No wonder if you wage war like this.
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That assumes that you want to get at them.
That's an illustration of the tendency I spoke of: it leads to conclusions that are based less on evidence than on assumption. If you assume that sanctuary is of prime importance, you tend to assume that the problem in Afghanistan is the Pakistanis, and are thus less likely to acknowledge or address the fairly significant problems with our own policies and practices. If you assume that sanctuary was the key factor in the ineffectiveness of Chinese resistance, you tend to overlook the possibility that the Chinese resistances were concerned more with surviving than with winning.
What were the sources on the casualty figures, and how reliable are they? Even if they are reliable (not many figures from that time and place can be trusted, and I certainly wouldn't trust any figures originating from the KMT) higher casualty figures on one side don't necessarily mean that side is initiating combat. They can just as easily mean one side is less effective at avoiding combat, is less adept at exploiting the sanctuary provided by China's size, is more inclined to concentrate forces and render them vulnerable to air attack, etc. The KMT were also in a position where the US was constantly pressuring them to fight, a problem the Communists of course did not have. I don't think you can base a conclusion on desire to fight purely on casualty figures. Those who were on the scene and playing attention, notably Gen. Stilwell, did not seem particularly convinced that the KMT wanted to fight the Japanese.
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary”
H.L. Mencken
No wonder if you wage war like this.
Ok, you got me beat. Non sequitur responses always do.
No, the conclusion that sanctuary is of prime importance is based on historical record and common sense. Recognizing that will not blind you to other faults unless you are a dumb-bell, in which case the primary problem is that you are a dumb-bell.
The Reds were more concerned about survival, so they ended the war stronger than when it started. The Nationalist guerrillas were mostly wrecked because I read they tried to coordinate their operations with conventional military ops. That didn't work out well for them.
Take all that up with the authors of the essays in the book. They were all apparently very highly reputed historians of various nationalities. All the essays were impressive.
"We fight, get beat, rise, and fight again." Gen. Nathanael Greene
I think that this aspect of war is often lost in peacetime, especially among the civilian leadership. The US could work with pretty long levers when it came to raw materials, industrial might and technology and not only in the military sector of the economy. In farming the differences between the US and Germany were arguably most pronounced with Japan having an even more (wo)men-power intensive agricultural sector. All this meant a big downstream support advantage for the tip of the spear.
For those who fought war is never cheap but a rough look at the casualities suffered by the US and China in their struggle against Japan shows that the share of the human burden, especially the dying part, quite loopsided. Of course dying alone has never won a war.
Last edited by Firn; 11-14-2012 at 05:47 PM.
... "We need officers capable of following systematically the path of logical argument to its conclusion, with disciplined intellect, strong in character and nerve to execute what the intellect dictates"
General Ludwig Beck (1880-1944);
Speech at the Kriegsakademie, 1935
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