Has the free world become too concerned about collatoral damage that it now...?

Question

lacks the will to fight a decisive war with overwhelming firepower, inflicting severe damage on the enemy, and enemy supporters? Is this evident in the ultraprecise weapons that take out targets, but leave the average person almost unaware that a war exists, except what is read in the paper? Does this paradigm compel a hostle nation to view the free world as liberators, or would capitulation under extreme suffering be more effective in bringing a long lasting peace?

"Overwhelming firepower" is a relative term to the situation at hand. To understand me to mean "nuke 'em" all the time is naive. I mean that when a battle is fought, we fight it unfaily to win, i.e. with overwhelming firepower against the enemy at hand. That may mean 100 special forces against one house. I hope this clears the misunderstanding.

Answer 1

I think the media and public would have a hard time dealing with the news after D-Day or Tarawa. Today we can look back and say "because of D-Day we did this, or because of the battle of Tarawa or Iwa Jima we did that." But the day after the battles all we knew was that there were a ton of dead americans.


I dont think the public could handle that.

Answer 2

But against whom? I think the debate today has much more to do about politics than the actual carrying out of war. Reading those history books, I don't feel particularly appalled by the idea of bombing German cities - I feel it had to be done and probably would have felt the same back then.
In the case of these wars of today, some criminals operate a criminal act and our government convinces us this necessitates a war with a country that had nothing to do with it, in a so called 'preemptive' strike. I'm concerned about civilian casualties (and military casualties) because I can't understand the necessity of this war. Nor can I see anything positive come out of it, aside from the fact a certain Saddam Hussein is no longer in power.

Answer 3

no, as of right now, no conflicts exist that would require the use of such "overwhelming firepower", the war in iraq and elsewhere against "terrorism" is not a conventional one, where one country is against another. instead, this is guerrilla war-fare, no real "army" or "military", just a large group of radical extremists. they have no bases or stations, they hide out in the houses of ordinary citizens. such a weapon you propose utilizing "overwhelming firepower" would not fit here. but if say, germany, invaded us, i'm sure we wouldn't hesitate nearly as much so

Answer 4

We did that in Desert Storm, with very little collateral damage.
The problem was we didn't finish the job. And just look what
happened.

Korea and Viet Nam were conflicts that were being run by
our politicians instead of the military. Look what happened there.