Lunar combat

[Ozymandias_the_Goat]

Why would anyone fight over the moon in this century when people will be fighting over water on earth? And i must agree that sometimes these seemingly childish treads can be pretty fun to debate over.

[PB666]

1 hour ago, lobe said:

The US and Russia have never fought themselves though. Pretty much all warfare since World War Two has been asymmetric, a large industrialized nation fighting an insurgency or an agrarian nation. A lot of the wars the US fought after WW2 have been civil wars where the US got involved to 'spread democracy'.  In fact I think there has been no conflict between any two nuclear armed nations.

Getting political

 the problem you have to consider that these asymmetrical powers had non-asymmetric fates (Keeping this as absolutely apolitical, in the post WWII context - Cho-san peninsula, Afghanistan, Indochina, East block)  Aggressively applied military power, under a global world view, cannot by itself win conflicts, instead it breeds conflicts and antagonistic combatants.

@todofwar

Sending a man to the moon first, not because you could wipe your enemy off the face of the earth, but because you have not crippled yourself socially, economically and intellectually in some 19th/early 20th century process . . . .  to a point that you cannot as a superpower compete on the world stage. Victory on the moon is building a better, more efficient, more self-sufficient base of operation, and then topping yourself doing another colony on the other pole better, its not exclusive or excluding others. That would be like blowing up ones own satellite. Victory is landing on a barge and failing, landing on land, and then nailing the landing on the barge. That's how you convince your global viewing detractors. This is why I disagree about the shuttle program, cancelling it without a suitable replacement, no matter how inefficient the highly awarded repetitious program was, was self-marginalizing progress. 

The process of designing an attack, Yamamoto, trained in the west, he did all too well, and then he told his leaders (Tojo emperial council) execution comes with grave warnings and he repeated these publically. While he was planning this, is primary opponent was planning its economic growth which included social modernization. But those leaders headed not his warning and grasp at his successes, many of those leaders survived at least a few year more (on until 1989). Yamamoto was taken out by his enemies over the Solomon Islands 2 years later. Conflict breeds its own self-destruction and designing for conflict creates a pretense for that; but the dogs never lose war's trail. It is something that Nagasaki-gen like to remind the Imperial government. The Greek tragedy that unveiled his weakness, after failing to convince his peers, the only viable choice is to not to participate in the design or execution further. See the qualifications for war crimes.

 

[tater]

Yamamoto was not alone in his worry about the US, it was actually a quite common assumption in the Imperial General HQ. In Combined Fleet Decoded, there is a quote from someone at IGHQ who said that the consensus view was that war with the US held a "90% chance of national death." They rolled the dice on a 10% chance of victory. I'd argue that the Pearl Harbor attack in fact guaranteed they would lose, even had the war declaration arrived the planned moments before the attack. Their only hope was a short war with a negotiated peace, and any surprise attack meant that we'd not ever consider that. Interestingly, we followed the pre-war planning almost to the letter, only changing small details (the rainbow war plans, specifically War Plan Orange). Before the war, in the '30s, a Japanese Naval Attaché talked about war with an American Admiral (it was well known that the 2 sides were presumptive rivals in the PTO), and was told something like (my paraphrase): you might do really well for a few months, but every loss you have is permanent, and we will only get stronger and stronger until we are standing in Tokyo.

[PB666]

3 minutes ago, tater said:

Yamamoto was not alone in his worry about the US, it was actually a quite common assumption in the Imperial General HQ. In Combined Fleet Decoded, there is a quote from someone at IGHQ who said that the consensus view was that war with the US held a "90% chance of national death." They rolled the dice on a 10% chance of victory. I'd argue that the Pearl Harbor attack in fact guaranteed they would lose, even had the war declaration arrived the planned moments before the attack. Their only hope was a short war with a negotiated peace, and any surprise attack meant that we'd not ever consider that. Interestingly, we followed the pre-war planning almost to the letter, only changing small details (the rainbow war plans, specifically War Plan Orange). Before the war, in the '30s, a Japanese Naval Attaché talked about war with an American Admiral (it was well known that the 2 sides were presumptive rivals in the PTO), and was told something like (my paraphrase): you might do really well for a few months, but every loss you have is permanent, and we will only get stronger and stronger until we are standing in Tokyo.

This is going to be the fate of any aggressor that is not directly in secured control of its resource base. Technnology in and of itself cannot win a war, certainly not keep the peace afterward.

[tater]

Yeah, their logistical failures (the war was entirely to secure the NEI for oil) were... significant.

[DDE]

This in general would be a fight between eggshells armed with sledgehammers, on a totally flat battlefield with extremely high visibility. Therefore, it would be shockingly fast. Individual combatants would have a very small role to play.

On ‎27‎.‎04‎.‎2016 at 7:25 AM, Atlas2342 said:

Well, military lasers are not *really* 2016 techology plus they take lots of energy ...

The USS Ponce and its LaWS would like to burn away this overly broad statement. Please hold still for ten seconds...