[kulahan]

I did, and it’s really not very convincing at all. It uses an example where a terror group in Japan was able to injure thousands of people with a chemical attack, and act as if this is… not a particularly effective outcome?

Additionally, that “if you can find them” is doing some pretty heavy lifting. The range of explosives and kinetics is hilariously low, and the actual percentage of your military with the level of mobility he seems to be referring to is infinitesimal.

This argument more correctly explains why chemical weapons aren’t a great defense against precision strike groups. It also doesn’t get into detail with concepts like dropping a bomb right in the middle of a firefight knowing it literally cannot harm your own troops, short of the physical metal accidentally falling on one of your own troops.

[Muromec]

>I did, and it’s really not very convincing at all. It uses an example where a terror group in Japan was able to injure thousands of people with a chemical attack, and act as if this is… not a particularly effective outcome?

Yes, it isn't effective outcome in terms of meeting their objective

> It also doesn’t get into detail with concepts like dropping a bomb right in the middle of a firefight knowing it literally cannot harm your own troops

That's a video games logic, it doesn't work like that in practice. Even civil grade riot control tear gas grenade is pretty traumatic because it still explodes to disperse the gas (source : implied first hand knowledge). That and warfare is messy, which means half the time half the protective gear will be destroyed from the usual exploding and shooting happening, gas gets carried away by the wind in a random direction, etc, etc.

[kulahan]

> That's a video games logic

No, it’s science. There are about a million ways to protect your own troops if that’s actually what you want to do.

It feels like you’re arguing against the idea of chemical weapons from the 1940s, rather than nearly a century later.

You don’t need protective gear. You can create sprays, lotions, inhalants, and other countermeasures that don’t stop working the second a piece of cloth rips. Shit, You could make a biological agent that avoids a DNA marker created with an mRNA vaccine. Likely not nearly as fast, but perfectly lethal.

Modern chemical weapons and biological weapons are absolutely incomparable to their Vietnam counterparts.

[wffurr]

>> a terror group in Japan was able to injure thousands of people with a chemical attack

A terror attack on civilians is a lot different than modern militaries using them on each other.