The exceptions to that would be losing to the US and allowing the US to rebuild your country.
There was even a play, and later a movie about that, " The Mouse that Roared".

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1982 300SD " Wotan" ..On the road as of Jan 8, 2007 with Historic Tags

If the foe you defeated would have defeated and conquered you otherwise, well yes, winning is the good side to be on. We all have in our gene pool innumerable examples of such victors.

Wiping city states from existence used to work, say in the days of Moses as no one even heard about it for a long time, and were rarely in a position to A: care or B: do anything about it. And then the victor had new territory to exploit which gave some benefit.

Vietnam was weird for a number of reasons. We had no wish to occupy and settle the nation. They did not threaten us with overthrow. They did not threaten an ally of ours as they were not going to make it to France to wage war either. It was based on the mania of commie fear, that communism was like the ebola virus of economic/cultural arrangements that would spread and destroy more healthy arrangements.

And if our reason for fighting was merely to retain access to vital trade commodities, it would seem that aligning oneself with the faction in the nation that was 70-80% likely to popularly prevail would give one the smoothest access to future trade and be more efficient than stamping out said faction and replacing it with corrupt and unpopular puppets.

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1986 300SDL, 362K
1984 300D, 138K

Wiping-out the enemy is always going to be a winner. It literally could be no other way.

You have a narrow definition of courage. I suspect that part of the reason that vets of seriously hard wars (Pacific Theater Vets) don't talk much about their experience was that slaughtering people in hand to hand combat is a seriously taxing experience. It's one I haven't had but I gather that it will haunt you for years. I'm not even crazy about clubbing a rat that was non-lethally caught by a trap. I do it of course but there is some unpleasantness to it.

I can only imagine what might go through the mind of a young man who is not cut from Ollie North cloth in the midst of the Vn War, and some of this was from horses' mouths. After seeing troops from South Vn go through the motions and generally stand back and let the Americans do the fighting, and after getting the impression that we were backing really unpopular people - sure losers most likely, they began to lose stomach for aggressively taking death to the enemy; began to wonder about the designation of the Vietnamese in question as 'the enemy.'

I could see being more enthusiastic about killing the enemy in some conflicts than others. Stepping back and saying "WTF? - I'm not carrying this gun any more, I'm forfeiting the fight," well not in the heat of battle but safely at base would take its own sort of courage. Isn't murder generally thought to be among the serious sins? How does one define murder?

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1986 300SDL, 362K
1984 300D, 138K

Bot's talking macro theory, your talking tactical practice.

Again look at the war college links, military thought is a field of study like any other.


Winning is always the best place to be, their are no if, and, or buts about it, and wiping out the enemy totally is the most affective way to achieve this. Now taking that and breaking it down to practical theory with politics, resources, etc thrown in is a massive area of study.

If you want to talk about specific wars such as Vietnam that's fine, but that's not what Bot is saying.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otJp3Qt7Vuw
Clausewitz is a good place to start.

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2006 CL500
1969 280SE
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Yes, but my point is that annihilating the enemy is not necessarily a sign of victory or preferable outcome.

The generally unanswered question is when is it prudent to declare stalemate and withdraw?

Experimentation on this is not available. It could have been that if we'd changed the ROE and fought another 10 years, we'd lost another 60K men and still been in the rough. Ultimately there was more reason for them to continue the war than for us, and they weren't at the end of an 8,000+ mile line of supply. This was the view in '72 or so of them who urged enough such that official policy was a pulling of the plug.

In summation, recognizing that no victory is available and withdrawing is a greater victory than fighting on forever with no improvement in outlook and a decrease in morale and economic vigor.

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1986 300SDL, 362K
1984 300D, 138K

I missed something. Where did I define courage in this discussion?

From the perspective of the grunt, any war one is in, is a hard war.

I know talkative WWII vets and I know reticent ones. May have as much to do with personality differences as anything. Go hang out in a VFW Hall.

The word or term "vote" can be used as a noun, a verb, a transitive verb or an intransitive verb. In addition, the meaning of the word or term "vote" has evolved and changed over a period of 500 years. You, like so many other non-thinkers and non-researchers have a set mindset concerning the meaning(s) of specific words. Guess what? The English language is dynamic, ever evolving according to common usages, practices, geographical locales, the list goes on.......

From the following link which I suggest you take the time to peruse; believe it or not, we didn't learn everything about the use of English words and terms during our tenure in elementary school........

Origin of VOTE

Middle English (Scots), from Latin votum vow, wish — more at vowFirst Known Use: 15th century

Vote - Definition and More from the Free Merriam-Webster Dictionary

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/vow

From the following link which I suggest you take the time to read thoroughly:

vote
c.1460, from L. votum "a vow, wish, promise, dedication," noun use of neut. of votus, pp. of vovere "to promise, dedicate" (see vow). The verb in the modern sense is attested from 1552; earlier it meant "to vow" to do something (1533).

Vote | Define Vote at Dictionary.com


Etymology; it's what's for dinner!

Etymology - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Then define vote as you were using it.

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- With out god, life is everything.
- God is an ever receding pocket of scientific ignorance that's getting smaller and smaller as time moves on..." Neil DeGrasse Tyson
- You can pray for me, I'll think for you.
- When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.

OK, you didn't mention courage. And in most wars, I would agree that wiping out the enemy is going to be more likely to assure one's survival.

But this is more likely to be true in cases where one side or the other is trying to take over territory for their own use.

But in some of our recent wars, it was unlikely that them we were fighting were going to cause us grief unless we went to their shores and started shooting. Iraq, Panama, Vietnam. Crushing the enemy is often portrayed as an act that required courage.

Changing the ROE so that we could more efficiently bring about mass death of a population doesn't strike me as an automatic gain.

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1986 300SDL, 362K
1984 300D, 138K

Did they lose by a few "votes" or a few "vows"?? Seems to me over a million people STILL speaking and writing the German language represents a contingency. Prior to WWI, German was second only to English. They voted with their pens and their mouths. Still do. If you drive a Mercedes Benz or use many other German products, I guarantee the original engineering drawings and parts descriptions are in (drum roll please) GERMAN. That means if you are wheeling one of these German autos down the highway, you are a part of it, like it or not.

Quote:

Originally Posted by davidmash Non thinker? Coming from you that is rich. If you to use a word with a different meaning that it now posses, then you need to define that word at the outset of your statement. This is 2014 and we all know what the word 'vote' means today. That is how the word is used today. Where your supposition falls flat is when you say it lost by a "mere few".

We all know what, exactly? Don't include your neighbors, me or anyone else by the use of "We". You have permission to ONLY speak for yourself, no one else. Seems that since the meaning of the word "Vote" has evolved and changed over the past 500 years, it just might be possible that its meaning is STILL dynamic and changing.

This. NOTHING IS SET IN STONE, NOTHING.

The neutron bomb would be a good way to achieve a kill ration of 10M:1. Or 10M:0. There would appear to be some serious objection to that weapon as it's never been used, AFAIK. Perhaps if mass killing is too easy, can be done w/o any immediate downside to the them that issue the weapon, strange ambition can come into play.

This was a rather cryptic remark. What I meant was that the objective of some of our recent wars was not to utterly crush the enemy but to fine tune the policies and practices of the target nation so that they were more useful to us and less of a risk to various of our interests. To accomplish that, one needs to nurture allies on the scene.

In Vietnam, it appeared that our enemies were going to seriously outnumber those who could serve as our installed allies, and that our puppets would not long endure absent a regular infusion of blood and treasure on our part. And since we didn't want to settle the territory, wholesale slaughter really had no upside. Such slaughter does contain the potential for downside, in world opinion if nothing else. These factors are also present in Iraq and Afg one could argue.

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1986 300SDL, 362K
1984 300D, 138K

Winning answer !!!!!

Your prize is a $100 gift certificate to "Bed, Bath and Beyond" and a hooker with one leg shorter than the other..

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2013 Jaguar XF, 20k <----340 hp Supercharged, All Wheel Drive (sold)

You said "vote" so let's go with that.

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2014 C250 21,XXX my new DD ** 2013 GLK 350 18,000 Wife's new DD**

- With out god, life is everything.
- God is an ever receding pocket of scientific ignorance that's getting smaller and smaller as time moves on..." Neil DeGrasse Tyson
- You can pray for me, I'll think for you.
- When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.

We choose weapons depending on perceived need. Legality and morality are only of use when force is overwhelmingly in favor of one side or the other. No question in my mind that any party in a war ail use whatever weapons or tactics are available if they are approaching annihilation. Justifying it comes later, when the historians on the victorious side write it.

I agree with you concerning the wars run by politicians that you listed. Politicians are too ready to negotiate, too willing to offer fellatio to the news media, and too spineless to accept losses. In the United States, politicians start wars and lose wars, not the soldiers.