For some reason today, we don't seem to understand what "war" is about. Look at how we view war today and how out of step we are with reality. In this blog, I will point out examples of this fact.
First, let's look at the bullets that our Army uses. They have to have a full metal jacket with no lead exposed. The thinking is that if our Army used the same bullets that hunters use for deer or rabbits, they would cause too serious of wounds. The full metal jacket bullets often go right thru without expanding like a hunting bullet and thus cause a much less serious wound. I thought the idea was to shot to kill. Do I have it all wrong?
I have talked to a lot of retired soldiers and very few had ever shot a rifle in a battle. I have never talked to a soldier who ever shot or killed some one. How did we win a war if we did not kill some one? What we have evolved into is an Army that does not want to confront the enemy up close. They want to shoot from miles away where they can not even see the enemy. It is call a "stand off" type of warfare. This means we have to design and build new types of weapons that are many times more expensive than the simple rifles that we used to use. Here is an example. If we want to blow up the entrance to an enemy hide out in a city, we design and build a multimillion dollar rocket that requires at least 50 trained soldiers to operate. Further, it takes us weeks to set up a plan to bomb the entrance to the enemy hide out, during which time the enemy might change locations.
Look at how our "low tech" enemy solves the same problem. He steals a 10 year old pickup truck and loads it with 1,000# of explosives and drives it into the entrance to our base and blows it up. Once he locates our entrance to our base, he only needs about an hour and two or three helpers to help him load the explosives into the pickup truck. He has our base entrance blown up that same afternoon at a cost less than the cost of paint on our high tech rocket.
We find the headquarters of our enemy and also find that it is located in the center of a city next to a school. What do we do? We do nothing because we are concerned that we might kill some of the kids in the school. What if the enemy found our headquarters and it was located next to both a school and a hospital? What do you think that they would do? They would steal an Army ambulance and load it with explosives and drive it into the hospital.
We send out a multimillion dollar airplane that can not be seen by radar to bomb an enemy who does not have any radar. We drop a million dollar computer guided bomb on a 10 year old Toyota pick up with two terrorists inside. If we were to keep this up, we would go broke and the terrorists would still be driving around in 10 year old Toyota pick ups shooting up the place. Remember that we only drop our multimillion dollar computer guided bomb less than 33% of the times we fly over the battle field.
Our new enemy may only have 1% of the financial resources that we have, but they can kill us for less than 0.01% of what we have to spend to kill them. That means they have 100 times the affective financial power on the battle field that we do. Those are some of the "Facts About War" today.
PS---What does a farmer do when his fields have so many weeds that he can no longer grow a crop by tilling and cultivating the weeds alone? He sprays the fields with "Roundup"!!! Round up kills the weeds and every thing else so the farmer can start all over again. In today's world, we have areas where there are now so many weeds that there is no other solution other than total eradication with some thing like "Roundup". You know it is true. The only question is where and when!!
