From: Adrian Tymes (wingcat@pacbell.net)
Date: Sat Apr 19 2003 - 22:52:49 MDT
--- John Grigg <starman2100@lycos.com> wrote:
> Adrian, if I understand you right, you are saying a
> nation with a fairly powerful military and
> industrial base such as Russia or China would be
> offlimits, while a smaller and less technically
> advanced & no nukes ready to go nation, such as
> Iraq, would be vulnerable to us.
Not quite. A nation like France or Germany - or for
that matter, Brazil, Australia, or South Africa -
would
also be off limits to us. It's not *just* the
powerful
military and industrial base, it's how one gets such.
Consider that, for all of China's modern repression,
it
is not presently as bad as Iraq was two months ago,
and
it is showing further signs of progress.
> Even with our current fairly sophisticated level of
> technology, could we defeat the Vietnamese NVA and
> Viet Cong if we were fighting that war today (and
> they were getting outside superpower help)?
Funny you should mention that. A bunch of the weapons
deployed in Gulf War I were designed on lessons
learned
in Vietnam.
> And
> even if they did not get massive outside assistance,
> I still doubt we could avoid being utterly worn down
> by guerilla tactics combined with the dense jungle
> terrain which gives such great cover for them.
There is some truth to that, but I point you to the
guerilla tactics some Saddam loyalists used in the
past month, in urban combat. It's effective, but not
insurmountable.
> But they might gain access to battle armor of their
> own, and use quantity vrs. quality, though this
> might not hold up for them. And cheap but plentiful
> robot drones might also be used by them, possibly
> even acquired by capturing some of those we deployed
> against them.
You'll note that Iraqi forces had tanks, and
apparently
more tanks than we deployed. It is true that quantity
has a quality all its own, but the operative military
term is "force multiplier". As in: one person,
properly equipped (mentally and physically), can be
the
equal or better of any number of poor quality troops.
> I would rather that the U.S. never fights another
> war, but if it did, I would like to see a major
> jungle conflict where we could further dispel the
> ghosts of Vietnam by defeating a determined
> combatant who uses the strategies and tactics which
> worked so well for the Vietnamese communists.
All cards on the table: the reason I was musing about
this in the first place was thinking about the worst
case scenarios for a lunar colony. An outbreak of
armed violence, or an armed invasion, would certainly
be bad, but it is perhaps not as likely as certain
more
technical problems, like life support malfunction.
Still, it was interesting to think how a military used
to Earth conflicts would even go about assaulting a
single giant underground building, assuming it was
self-sufficient enough they could not simply siege it
(which would necessitate underground power plants -
lunathermal, if that would be viable, otherwise
nuclear - so the invaders could not simply deactivate
the solar power plants feeding the colony), and the
colony did not have space defenses enough to destroy
any unidentified incoming vehicle (which would itself
be an undesirable outcome, but that's another
scenario).
> What do the rest of you think?
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Apr 19 2003 - 23:02:05 MDT