Quote Originally Posted by Rank amateur View Post
Nice to see my thoughts expressed by someone people might actually listen to. We might want to add, "Bomb the hell our of your palaces, party headquarters, army, secret police etc." Since new regimes will understand the US reluctance to take causalities, they are much less likely to call our bluff if we threaten bombing which we can do without causalities.
I think that the "US reluctance to take casualties is restricted to about a third of the population -- the most visible and vocal third, to be sure -- and that they are joined in this concern only on occasion and that occasion is whne the casualty causing effort is either taking too long (Steve's three years, my two...) or is obviously not doing well. The remaining third is comfortable with the casualties.

I'd like to suggest that the respective 'thirds' are immutably the same people but they are not. A great deal of objection is ideology based. Look no further than Kosovo and Iraq, respectively, to see who goes to which third.

Apply that rule of thumb to any war we've ever been including the current efforts and you see the American people will accept massive casualties if results are being produced; if there are no good results in their belief then the tolerance starts to slip. You can even review the domestic history in WW II -- after the summer of '44, tolerance for the war started downward precipitously.

As a corollary and an aside, that same two years (or three) applies to those fighting; after a couple of years, it gets really old. That really need to be considered. Troop run down or wear out can have really adverse consequences...

Thirty percent of the country is going to call that "cutting and running." How could we execute your recommendations in the current political environment?
Just by leading and accepting that 30% will ALWAYS exist; that's been true in every war from the American Revolution forward (again to WW II -- the nation was not as unified on that as many now like to believe). The key is not that 30%, it's the 30% in the middle, the swing vote as it were. As long as they see 'progress' of a sort, they will vary from 'tolerate' to 'support' and that gives the Admin of the day about 60%. That's enough for government work.

All that does not even address the chimera of "bomb" -- that just flat doesn't work, it NEVER has (the Serbs in Kosovo didn't start coming undone until the KLA was in on the ground). That aspect of Air Power (a power which I support and respect) is a very dangerous myth -- as the Israelis found out last year.