Quote Originally Posted by Fuchs View Post
Food for thought:

...

I believe that this "there will be no war between nuclear powers" is ideology.
A (kind of) war between nuclear powers on the terrain of a third nation already happened; Russian fighter pilots flew over Korea and fought against U.S. fighter pilots. The intensity of this was greater than the Kosovo Air War.

Never say never, you'll be caught unprepared if you do.

The threat of nuclear arms didn't make us save our conventional forces in the Cold War, why should that be a good idea today?

Our potential challengers are just not ready to strike us within few years, but it might happen in 5-10 years.


That's why the ability to expand military power quickly and launch that project with little lag is so important.

Korea is a bad example. I wouldn't speak of "nuclear powers" till about the late 1960's. But that's not the point.

You're German, right? Clausewitz talked about war as "die Fortsetzung der Politik mit anderen Mitteln". You have to ask: what could be so drastic as to cause a direct war among the 3-4 major powers? And: what could realisticly be achieved by such a war? I'm about the opposite of a peacenik, but I fail to come up with an answer.

And the argument with WW1 and 2 is flawed, since there was no qualitative leap ahead in "Bedrohungspotential" during the 1920's and 30's. Despite airpower and Panzerwaffe - just new toys.

The ability to annihilate whole chunks of land by automated systems (from about the late 1960's) was such a qualitative leap in Bedrohungspotential. And that leap made old lessons at least suspect. As long as MAD works between the major powers, conventional forces play only third fiddle.

Did conventional forces change anything during the Cold War? Tactical nukes would just have made them chared skeletons. And it was the nuclear options that kept Ivan from sunbathing on La Côte d'Argent, not the NATO Panzer Divisions.