North Korean army cleared to nuke the USA

[Professor]

[exploited]

Congratulations, you just made the most nonsensical post seen on PCF in at least the past day.

You said it was us vs them, therefore ???, which means you can't think in a war, which means all the thinking has to be done beforehand.

That is quite possibly the worst understanding of war I've ever seen, so far away from reality I can't tell if you are joking. The first thing that falls apart in battle is the plan. That is why the military invests so much into officer training and making them adaptable to the situation. To suggest that wars can be planned out, and that plan rigorously followed in detail, is literally stupid. The CIA had no idea China was going to directly intervene in Korea. It wasn't part of the plan, you see. But they did, and as a result, you saw a whole bunch of retreating Marines.

Look at Iraq. The plan was a minimal force to go in and occupy Baghdad, which would celebrate and be joyous. That plan fell apart within days, and Baghdad dissolved into a giant sectarian riot. If someone like you were in charge, the military would just stay the course... Oh, wait, that's exactly what happened, and it was a real success story.

[dontworrybehappy]

Ok, I'm going to throw in my two cents here.

Prof didn't say you don't change at all from your plan, in fact he said you must choose the appropriate response with as little variation from the original plan as possible. That's exactly right. If you plan to go in and occupy Baghdad, midway through you don't want to change to instead occupy Sitter City on the other side of the country. That would be a huge variation from the original plan, and should be avoided.

I'm kinda curious whether you can comprehend what people write. He didn't at all say what you said he did, and even he questioned your reading skills in a prior post. It seems to me that you read what you want to read and respond accordingly. Kinda known as a strawman around these parts.

[exploited]

[Professor]

Ex, exactly how much military training have you had? While I didn't exactly attend War College myself, I did take several courses regarding military strategy - both studying past wars (mainly Vietnam and Iraq1, since this was in 1996), and how to prepare for future ones.

You bring up China intervening in Korea. The CIA may not have "thought" they would do that, but I know for a fact that this was one possible scenario envisioned by the Pentagon. There were contigency plans drawn up for it. That plan was to retreat. The reason that there weren't more Marines there in the first place was because that contingency had a low probability of happening. So, rather than plan for the least probable thing, they planned for the most probable. And, they were wrong. But, they had a plan.

I'm not saying that "no one needs to ever think at all during a war". To take that literally is absurd. Of course you have to think. I mean that you cannot "overthink" a war.

Take Vietnam. For a long while, there were "thinktanks" in Washington who "thought" about tactical decisions. Quite literally, a Lieutenant would call in close air support air strike because his squad was pinned down by Viet Cong mortars. That call would get routed to HQ. Then HQ would submit the request back to Washington. The relevant thinktank would review the request, and think about where the mortars were located (were they in Laos?). They would consider the resources being requested (if we send in heavy bombers, will it provoke the Chinese or Russians further). They would consider which branch was appropriate for the response (there wasn't one supreme commander, and if the Navy had been given the opportunity to respond last time, it was the AF turn). They'd make a decision, and it'd have to be approved by the relevant Administration personnel (Secretary of the Navy, Secretary of War, Joint Chairman, POTUS, etc.). Finally, approval would be granted and an air strike would be authorized. The problem was, this took hours or days (sometimes), during which time the squad had been killed, the VC had moved, or something else had happened to change the situation on the ground.

This is what I mean. You cannot think during war. You think before the war. You plan for every contingency. Then, you execute.

You may be thinking of Moltke's theory of war (bastardized here) that "No plan survives contact with the enemy". But, only the untrained interpret that as "plans are useless in war". In fact, what he means is that you can plan only the first few stages of war. Thereafter, you must be prepared to deal with all possible outcomes of your initial action, and then be prepared to deal with all possible outcomes from your reaction to their reaction to your initial action. This is why we have supercomputers in DC and elsewhere that do nothing but run scenarios of war. Short of NK unleashing Godzilla on us, whatever happens over there, has already happened over here in some computer.

[eynon81]

[Spider]

[eynon81]

[exploited]

[Professor]