[techdmn]

I'm shocked at the lack of humanity in this story. Every once in a while an "enemy" will start a war, and we'll get a bunch of coverage about orphans and mothers and fathers and horror, and I think maybe just maybe people will realize that all wars are terrible. Except when we start them, then I guess it's mostly kind of funny because our intelligence wasn't as great as it could have been?

[bpodgursky]

The US didn't start the war that Desert Storm ended.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraqi_invasion_of_Kuwait

[deburo]

All wars are bad and the US doesn't go to war because it thinks it's funny. Unrelated people may joke about it, as usual.

[AtlasBarfed]

Why were we in Iraq the second time?

Why were we in Vietnam?

Why did we stay in Afghanistan for so long?

The military industrial complex does indeed find war funny. It's called laughing all the way to the bank.

[xyzzy21]

This is what war is all about.

This is why many want cooler heads to prevail in the Russia-Ukraine war now!

Those who have lived through war know how horrific and uncontrollable it is and how sociopathic you need to become to wage it successfully.

Intelligence is the first problem. Then the model to fit it to. Then the conclusions to take from it. Each layer is HIGHLY prone to error.

Just an example: precision munitions largely eliminate the odds of NOT killing to zero but then it's the intelligence and interpretation that becomes the weak link: are you really hitting the right target for the larger purpose, or are you doing everything wrong hitting the wrong target because you are measuring success wrongly (e.g. body count - as we did in Vietnam and then returned to in Iraq and Afghanistan - simply because it was the only thing we could measure; classic "streetlight fallacy")

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetlight_effect

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy

[kenneth]

Sometimes, war is necessary and early action prevents a far worse outcome. You could argue that if Hitler had been dealt with earlier (e.g. when he invaded Poland), he would not have been able to get started causing such a rampage. But fear and inaction by other European powers at the time caused him to be emboldened by early success, and to pick off neighbors one by one.

I would argue Russia is in a very similar position today, and if we don't act decisively now, we're just enabling Putin to do far more damage in the long run. The risk of WWIII and a nuclear exchange does exist, but the risk of on inaction is just as high.