He's right you know, the only way to do battle is with honor and sportsmanship. Taking advantage of terrain and circumstance to take potshots at the enemy is frowned upon and shames both the commander and his men, no matter how effective it is.
The proper way would have been to give the sleeping soldiers advance warning so that they may be prepared and meet you on an open field; and have enough time to line up their men and return a volley of fire, to your line of men and their volley of fire. That way the best man of skill and courage may win without violating the rules of war.
(/s)
I'm being sarcastic, the guy above you was a dumbass. Note the (/s).
Fighting effectively is the most ethical way to fight, you want the war to be ended decisively as soon as possible to lessen suffering. If that means killing sleeping soldiers, sure thing, the more of them you kill the less they'll want to fight and the easier they'll come to concessions.
It's not cowardly at all, just effective tactics, cowardice in war would be abandoning your post.
What's your opinion on how George Washington crossed the river on Christmas Eve to slaughter a bunch of drunk british?
My opinion on that is that it didn't happen.
Washington crossed the Delaware to attack a bunch of drunken Germans, Hessian mercenaries loyal to the crown. Supposedly these guys were hard as nails, real badasses- but the attack was so unexpected, so sudden and so well executed that they were defeated with less than like 20 total dead on both sides. Most of them just surrendered, too drunk/cold to put up any meaningful resistance against an organized assault.
(Whitest kids you know, polite war sketch)
I get it, I get it. I suppose I never really got past my idealic views of how a “utopian” society would conduct warfare, lol.
Obviously in reality, people will take any and every advantage they can get, regardless of how underhanded it is. It is the winners, after all, the write history - so they can keep the nasty things they did to achieve victory a secret.
People have this strange idea that you win wars "honorably". You dont. You "honorably" lose or create a multi-decade insurgency.
If you want to win, you negotiate a peaceful solution (not a war) or you win the war by destroying the enemy. Not by lining up in an open field to take turns murdering each other, but by utterly destroying the enemy. As in you identify where the enemy is, destroy key military positions through targeted strikes, and then carpet bomb everything else until either the enemy (including unlawful combatants) totally surrenders or everyone is dead.
Exhibit A: Japan. Firebombed until it should have surrendered, then nuked twice to get the point across.
Exhibit B: WWII Germany: Bombed and then invaded so thoroughly that Naziism is literally illegal there now.
The USA should have done the same with Afghanistan: either negotiate (preferable), or obliterate it. If that meant setting up a free fire zone for anything moving within 20 miles of the border and nuking every population center...too damn bad. War is hell, lest we should grow too fond of it.
True. If your enemy refuses to make reasonable negotiations to cease hostilities and continually violates any agreements, then you annihilate that enemy.
In Afghanistan I still don't understand why first the Soviets were there pussy footing around and pissing off survivors in villages they tried to wipe out and then when efforts failed to Sovietize them they pulled out and we found an excuse to go in and start all over again with our own ideology. Why were Soviets there and why were we there? There must be a common objective beyond ideology which was to me looking like just an excuse.
Mining rights? What does that area have that's of such vital importance?
Japan didn't surrender because we dropped two nukes on them. They were willing to endure an invasion by the Americans. What got them to surrender was when the USSR declared war against Japan a day or two before. They didn't want a Soviet invasion because they new the outcome would be far worse.
With Afghanistan, and the Soviets found this out as well, is you can't bomb a country into submission if the majority of the population already lives in stone age conditions. That war was strickly to have control of the poppy fields.
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