Lessons from 20th Century Wars: Go Big or Go Home

There is no such thing as a humane war. Indulging in such fantasies, with CNN enforcing the rules, has made the world a more dangerous place.

GANJGAL, Afghanistan — We walked into a trap, a killing zone of relentless gunfire and rocket barrages from Afghan insurgents hidden in the mountainsides and in a fortress-like village where women and children were replenishing their ammunition. (Source: Jonathan Landay, a real battlefield reporter for McClatchy)

David Warren, trenchant thinker and writer from Canada, observes that "The Second World War was the unfinished business of the First World War."

Germans were left with the possibility of believing that they hadn't really lost the war, that they had been somehow cheated at Versailles, that in the upshot of their military aggression they were somehow victims not perpetrators...
This is precisely what made the Hitler phenomenon possible in Germany. And it was the bitter experience of 1945 -- the unconditional surrender of Germany, in the ruins of Berlin -- that ultimately cleansed the German nation of militarist ambitions.

Is is no longer possible to just go in and completely wipe somebody out in a fiery, bloody carnage. Gotta protect their dignity, can't kill any "innocent" civilians whose skirts the "brave fighters" are hiding behind. Nobody gets their ass beat anymore, and that's the problem.

We rained down fiery hell on Germany and Japan, followed up by an allied land invasion, full occupation, and execution of the guilty. Look at them now... They don't wanna fight no more.

War is Hell
That's how you take the fight out of people. A little inhumanity up front saves a whole lot of it down the road.

That is what General Tecumseh Sherman meant when he said "War is hell." He believed it should be hell in order to teach the belligerents a harsh, bloody lesson that would make them think twice before starting something again.

Ralph Peters explains:

It isn't just that war is hell. It's that war must be hell, otherwise why would the enemy ever quit?

We are no longer permitted to visit hell upon our enemies. They can take us on and live to fight (and brag about it) another day. We had better learn to pick our fights: Go big or go home. Otherwise, we're just wasting peoples' lives.

Navy Seal Marcus Luttrell, lone survivor of Operation Redwing, said it best:

If you don't want to get into a war where things go wrong, where the wrong people sometimes get killed, where innocent people sometimes have to die, then stay the hell out of it in the first place.
-- Marcus Luttrell, Navy Seal, from Lone Survivor, p. 313

Further Reading:
Newsweek - McChrystal
WaPo - Rajiv Chandrasekaran
NY Post - Amir Taheri
David Warren
Byron York - Afghanistan