Making Americans feel bad is the only way to make war unpopular enough that careerist politicians reconsider going to war.
i didn’t see that in the withdrawals from Iraq and Afghanistan. I don’t see it historically as what moved Nixon.
I also don’t see how shooting down an enemy plane such that it kills the enemy pilots could be strategically worse than shooting down an enemy plane but the enemy pilots survive and escape. Not that there’s any such thing as strategically shooting down an enemy plane in a way where you can choose to let the enemies survive and escape.
setting aside getting a POW out of it, injuries are more expensive than deaths both in raw dollars and in the logistical strain. Pilots who eject are frequently career over because ejecting fucks up your body so that’s both permanently out of the fight and more expensive than a dead guy.
I want every aircraft carrier to be sunk, there’s no way for that to happen without dead boots of course, but the main demotivating factor of a carrier kill or two isn’t the dead people it’s the vulnerability of the wunderwaffle. That’s why they would lie about a friendly fire incident if it was actually Iran that shot down the planes.
optimizing for the american public’s morale isn’t how you win a war against america. Hating Iran is a decades-long bipartisan effort from the ruling class and public opinion has literally never driven foreign policy. Not caring about american feelings means i don’t put any value one way or the other, whether it’s our catharsis from a soldier fucking around and finding out or his mom being sad about it.
i’ll be spamming crab emojis along with everyone else but as an armchair general looking at previous wars the strategic consideration of american feelings i don’t think expending extra resources to confirm individual kills is beneficial to the anti-american effort.
edit: if they die they die, and they deserve it, especially signing up after they saw what their country was doing in the middle east while they were growing up. I’m not squeamish about violent resistance i’m hyperfixating on the bigger picture and you’re apparently misinterpreting “it might be strategically optimal not to kill americans for strategic reasons” with some kind of consideration for them as people.
i didn’t see that in the withdrawals from Iraq and Afghanistan. I don’t see it historically as what moved Nixon.
setting aside getting a POW out of it, injuries are more expensive than deaths both in raw dollars and in the logistical strain. Pilots who eject are frequently career over because ejecting fucks up your body so that’s both permanently out of the fight and more expensive than a dead guy.
I want every aircraft carrier to be sunk, there’s no way for that to happen without dead boots of course, but the main demotivating factor of a carrier kill or two isn’t the dead people it’s the vulnerability of the wunderwaffle. That’s why they would lie about a friendly fire incident if it was actually Iran that shot down the planes.
optimizing for the american public’s morale isn’t how you win a war against america. Hating Iran is a decades-long bipartisan effort from the ruling class and public opinion has literally never driven foreign policy. Not caring about american feelings means i don’t put any value one way or the other, whether it’s our catharsis from a soldier fucking around and finding out or his mom being sad about it.
i’ll be spamming crab emojis along with everyone else but as an armchair general looking at previous wars the strategic consideration of american feelings i don’t think expending extra resources to confirm individual kills is beneficial to the anti-american effort.
edit: if they die they die, and they deserve it, especially signing up after they saw what their country was doing in the middle east while they were growing up. I’m not squeamish about violent resistance i’m hyperfixating on the bigger picture and you’re apparently misinterpreting “it might be strategically optimal not to kill americans for strategic reasons” with some kind of consideration for them as people.