U.S. Military - Terror

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Re: U.S. Military - Terror
« Reply #30 on: April 19, 2010, 03:07:54 AM »
The only thing that the course of action outlined in the OP could do is ruin Americas international relations (because those are so good etc.) and screw over the army even harder.
In a war against terror you need to convince the terrorist's recruitment base (i.e. civillians in the conflict areas) to hate the terrorist more than they hate you. Making them scared of you only makes that harder, and once you start using flamethrowers on Bob Wallace from down the street, who they used to go to school with and occasionaly go around to his house for scrabble and some coffee (and isn't it a shame about his wife and did you hear they might be moving over to Fig Tree Pocket) its a good way to ensure they don't think favourably of you.
No army using a "fear campaign" has ever caused anything other than resentment in their occupational zone.


Also, why so 4chan?
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Re: U.S. Military - Terror
« Reply #31 on: April 22, 2010, 07:18:03 AM »
The real problem with the OP's idea is that the 'fear factor' cuts two ways. Yes, your enemies will be afraid of you, but if you're an occupying power, so will the local population whose support you need to win the war. Furthermore, your troops will eventually come to inhabit the psyche you build around them, making them more liable to commit atrocities on the civilian population, further alienating support.
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Re: U.S. Military - Terror
« Reply #32 on: April 24, 2010, 11:48:41 PM »
The only thing that the course of action outlined in the OP could do is ruin Americas international relations (because those are so good etc.) and screw over the army even harder.
In a war against terror you need to convince the terrorist's recruitment base (i.e. civillians in the conflict areas) to hate the terrorist more than they hate you. Making them scared of you only makes that harder, and once you start using flamethrowers on Bob Wallace from down the street, who they used to go to school with and occasionaly go around to his house for scrabble and some coffee (and isn't it a shame about his wife and did you hear they might be moving over to Fig Tree Pocket) its a good way to ensure they don't think favourably of you.
No army using a "fear campaign" has ever caused anything other than resentment in their occupational zone.


Also, why so 4chan?

As mentioned in my earlier post, this is only one of the two primary schools of though on counter-insurgency strategy. The other is to eliminate entirely the support base for the insurgents by destroying infrastructure that could be used by the populace to aid them. In the past the second one has been extremely effective, but also very destructive and very unpopular. That's why the US is choosing to be a centrist on insurgency, staying on the good side of the populace but also directly attacking support infrastructure. Ineffective, but now that we are handing the duty over to their governments we should see some better results.
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