Originally Posted by Rochard

Yes. We are still in Germany, and still in Japan.

We have two sides of war. We have what we did in WWII, and then what we have done ever since.

During WWII, we had complete warfare. We bombed the shit out of everything. "Oh, ten percent of the population of this town is involved in munitions manufacturing? We'll have to firebomb it". Over night we send one hundred bombers to firebomb a town, killing tens of thousand of people, in some cases over one hundred thousand people, destroying entire towns in the process. In Japan the United States nuked two entire cities. Over the course of the war over sixty million people died - mostly civilians. Everyone lost everything. Everyone lost family members, in some cases entire families; Everyone lost their businesses, their jobs, their houses, everything they owned, and went hungry for years at a time.

Since WWII the nature of warfare has changed. The larger countries are extremely reluctant to engage each other in open war (which is why we have proxy wars). We wanted to accomplish our goals without complete destruction, and avoid unnecessary deaths as much as possible. This is a great idea - we shouldn't kill each other - but it just doesn't work. We tested this with Korea, and here we are fifty years later technically still at war, a country divided, people still dying, and war can break out again at any time. We did this with Vietnam also. The United States never lost a battle in Vietnam, but we failed to go all out to win the war. We did the same thing with Iraq - the goal was to remove Iraq from Kuwait, and we quickly did this, but it failed to fix the problem and we had to go back a second time but still do not engage all out warfare.

Let me give you another great example.... During the Six Day War Israel bitch smacked most of the Middle East - Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and Iraq. It was quick and brutal; Egypt lost it's entire air force. It was a clear win for Israel, but the losers do not consider it a loss at all. In fact, they call it something completely different - they call it "The Setback". To this very day this is still unresolved, and people are dying.

Do you see the difference? In all out war everyone suffered, everyone lost everything, everyone lost their houses, their business, their jobs, everything they owned, family members, every one starved, and no matter what they would never ever allow this to happen again. Without all out war the losing side is like "meh" and "we are still not happy".

Limited warfare doesn't work. It accomplishes limited objectives without fixing the over all problem.