War

[Randall]

Does this look familiar: "Except For Ending Slavery, Fascism, Nazism, and Communism, WAR has Never Solved Anything" ? Let's take this propaganda on one claim at a time:

Slavery:
It was actually started by war: "6800 B.C. The world’s first city-state emerges in Mesopotamia. Land ownership and the early stages of technology bring war—in which enemies are captured and forced to work: slavery."

Myths about the civil war and slavery: The North is mythologized as going to war to free the slaves: Quoting himself in other speeches, Lincoln said, "I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so."

Fascism:
It was actually started by war veterans: "In March 1919, Mussolini formed the Fascist Party, galvanising the support of many unemployed war veterans. He organised them into armed squads known as Black Shirts, who terrorised their political opponents. In 1921, the Fascist Party was invited to join the coalition government." BBC - History -Historic Figures: Benito Mussolini (1883-1945)

Nazism:
Also started by a war veteran: Military career of Adolf Hitler - Wikipedia

Communism:
War didn't "end communism": It's still around, and one of the scariest times in US history involved the anti-communist antics of McCarthyism: McCarthyism - Wikipedia

 

[marduk]

One would think that the whole reason for cracking a code in the first place is to gain a strategic advantage, and in the process save lives, so what's the point of having it if it's not going to be used? And let's not forget that the whole build-up and pretext for war is driven by propaganda and high powered people in the shadows in the first place. So there'd have be no need for secret codes and hard decisions if they'd never start the damn wars in the first place. But since they did, let's assume that certain circumstances might have warranted secrecy to "save lives". The Pearl Harbor attack was cited as a reason the USA was dragged directly into the war in the first place!

Funny story, but I've actually played with an enigma machine (pretty sure it was a replica) back in my history of computer science class.

And the guy that let me do it actually helped me understand what went down when they cracked it.

See... as soon as they cracked it, they didn't actually know what to do about it. Because if they let the Axis know that they did, they would just add another rotor or stop making mistakes in it's use and then British intelligence would be boned.

So they sat on it. Grabbing intelligence. And waiting. Without even letting most of their own commanders know about it.

And what they learned was far, far more valuable than any winning any particular battle or ambush... because what they learned was how the Axis war machine worked. And then they quite appropriately used it very selectively (even using statistical models to make sure the Germans wouldn't get spooked).

There's a great wiki page on it here:
Ultra - Wikipedia

And this book is a good read:
The Bletchley Park Codebreakers, Book by Ralph Erskine (Paperback) | chapters.indigo.ca

 

[Randall]

Funny story, but I've actually played with an enigma machine (pretty sure it was a replica) back in my history of computer science class.

And the guy that let me do it actually helped me understand what went down when they cracked it.

See... as soon as they cracked it, they didn't actually know what to do about it. Because if they let the Axis know that they did, they would just add another rotor or stop making mistakes in it's use and then British intelligence would be boned.

So they sat on it. Grabbing intelligence. And waiting. Without even letting most of their own commanders know about it.

And what they learned was far, far more valuable than any winning any particular battle or ambush... because what they learned was how the Axis war machine worked. And then they quite appropriately used it very selectively (even using statistical models to make sure the Germans wouldn't get spooked).

There's a great wiki page on it here:
Ultra - Wikipedia

And this book is a good read:
The Bletchley Park Codebreakers, Book by Ralph Erskine (Paperback) | chapters.indigo.ca

Yes, I know about that, and it was also portrayed in that movie about Turing, The Imitation Game ( excellent movie ), and I imagine it would be interesting to toy with an enigma machine ( even a replica ) .

But that doesn't negate the points made about Pearl Harbor, or justify how the wars got started in the first place. These cypher machines are just tools of war, things to be destroyed or defended, and are sadly deemed to be of higher value than the lives of those who use them or those whose lives they were meant to save. That isn't any different than a number of other examples of how war devalues human life. When we learn that the civilians on ships like the Lusitania were used as human shields for a cargo of munitions, and that the ship was most probably setup to be a target to draw the US into the war, we might ask just how sincere the excuse of "saving lives" was for those who were making the calls?

 

[mike]

I've been a war gamer for a very long time.
Not because i love war, But i enjoy problem solving and war games offer complex problems requiring complex solutions.
It's a science at a certain level, And like all science it has changed and evolved over time as the technology has.
There are also constants, As anyone who has read Sun Tzu's Art of war will recognize.

sadly deemed to be of higher value than the lives of those who use them or those whose lives they were meant to save

This is indeed sadly true when you are the General and not the Foot-soldier, Even chess expresses this reality with it's pawns as low value disposable assets.

The tactician who's aim it is to secure victory, can't let themselves get distracted by the micro, it's the macro that determines the result. For example.

Combat Loss Grouping
The principle that a group of 'Mechs (or other vehicles) engaged in combat will accumulate damage over time, leading to a point where several or all of the group will succumb to damage at the same time. Can also be used to describe the time a unit sustains enough losses that it is no longer a viable fighting force.


This is a dynamic that typifies the sort of statistical reality's that come into play. The foot-soldier who may be experiencing or even be the casualty of CLG can't do anything about it as part of his/her job. That job has to be done by someone else, Someone separated from the actual event.

Understanding how CLG works and why, is the only way to counter it. The alternative is to simply watch the entire force get expended to the last asset.

The management tasks of the Foot soldier and the General are very different in application.

 

[marduk]

Yes, I know about that, and it was also portrayed in that movie about Turing, The Imitation Game ( excellent movie ), and I imagine it would be interesting to toy with an enigma machine ( even a replica ) .

But that doesn't negate the points made about Pearl Harbor, or justify how the wars got started in the first place. These cypher machines are just tools of war, things to be destroyed or defended, and are sadly deemed to be of higher value than the lives of those who use them or those whose lives they were meant to save. That isn't any different than a number of other examples of how war devalues human life. When we learn that the civilians on ships like the Lusitania were used as human shields for a cargo of munitions, and that the ship was most probably setup to be a target to draw the US into the war, we might ask just how sincere the excuse of "saving lives" was for those who were making the calls?

There's saving lives, and then there's saving lives.

Imagine this ethical conundrum:

You have intelligence that a convoy is going to be ambushed, and sunk. It will cost 10,000 lives.

But if you use it, your intelligence apparatus takes a large blow, and will potentially cost millions of lives.

If America wasn't drawn into the war, Europe would all be Germany and 10s or hundreds of millions upon millions would be dead. And Russia would have fallen within 10 years. More millions.

I think the Brits got it right.

Besides they pissed of the Americans, which is always funny.

 

[Randall]

There's saving lives, and then there's saving lives.

Imagine this ethical conundrum: You have intelligence that a convoy is going to be ambushed, and sunk. It will cost 10,000 lives.

OK

But if you use it, your intelligence apparatus takes a large blow, and will potentially cost millions of lives.

That's a supposition with no way to verify it. Besides that, all kinds of mundane reasons can be manufactured to delay or divert a convoy, including planting of intel ( counterintelligence ) which would have been easy.

If America wasn't drawn into the war, Europe would all be Germany and 10s or hundreds of millions upon millions would be dead. And Russia would have fallen within 10 years. More millions.

That's another supposition. Plus we have to define what is meant by "get into the war". As indicated in previous posts, corporations and banks outside Germany were already manipulating the situation toward war and encouraging politicians to go that route, to the point where German uniforms were being made in British factories, and the Bank of England gave the Nazis tons of gold. Did the Brits get that right too? Would there even have been a war in the first place without the support of big business and banks?

Besides they pissed of the Americans, which is always funny.

Why is that?

 

[victimized]

War, a choice. Many wars were fought on the same reasoning......we evolve and become aware of dictatorships, and communities where we review lifestyle, status and monetary power. We review our own lives an make reasons for not wanting our lifestyle to change. Whilst we own this condition of thinking, so does the same thinking be owned elsewhere.

So we as a worldwide community own the same thinking status, as we have known before in this same condition.....evolution and human reasoning, status, religious teachings, laws and community standards. We called this condition a common status, a brotherhood.

Each country therefore owns its own brotherhood and each country has spied upon its own brother in other countries. Each brother vying for the top position that they consider should be theirs....complete ownership of life on Earth in an applied self status. We are currently re-evolving back to this condition once again.

Russia had a technique of reviewing phenomena for the control of minds and proposed that they could force the world community to think just like they did without war. For although they have been war-mongers themselves, as all of us they also value life and the innocence of life. America then took over where the Russians failed and completed the control of minds. Since this occurrence they have been coercing human choice to consider information in the status in which they want it to be considered.

Yet they are not considering information with innocence, they still use information in the same format in which it is thought, in a non spiritual status.

To their own coercing is only going to cause a greater amount of world problems for their thoughts are not spiritual and are not made for the continuance of life on Planet Earth.

After being victimized by a planned and organized scientific experiment and being enabled to regain an ability to discuss the situation, like many other human victims I have been ignored and ridiculed and it has been done through mind coercion. The same employed retorts that the operative uses are also the retorts that humanity are now expressing. So the war has already been won, America won it.....the loss of our spiritual nature and intelligence.

Eventually the war of machines will arise, just as prophecized, where the amount of the AI manifestation caused by experiments and conversion of nuclear products will be linked to our minds and our bodies by the machines that the sciences built for communication. Communication belonged to the AI condition.

The story of human kind's downfall is a prophecized war with machines.

 

[Han]

It is very hard to argue against the fact that "History" is one of the spoils of war.

But: I am yet to see any evidence that Nazi Germany did not start the war in Europe, or that Japan did not start it in the far east.

Whilst it is true that Britain declared war on Germany, and not the other way around, this was only as a result of the invasion of Poland.

Britain could and probably should have stopped hitler years before, but because of the trauma of WWI it was extremely reluctant to get involved, and on top of this they adhered to the ten year plan.
So in effect millions of people were killed indirectly as a result of inaction on the part of the people who allowed hitler to seize and consolidate power.

Prevention, is always better than cure, but sometimes you have to fight fire with fire.

As for the US, war was coming its way however isolationist it wanted to be, for example if Britain had yielded and joined the axis, then its territories over seas would have been in axis hands, for example Canada, which would have made an excellent staging ground for an invasion of the US, and if there was no fighting in Europe the axis could have turned all its attention to America. In other words hitler could have gone west instead of east and with Britain on side as well as Japan, Americas prospects for resistance would have been less than poor, and they would have probably joined the axis too, then Russia would have been next, and then China, and so on.

 

[marduk]

OK
That's a supposition with no way to verify it. Besides that, all kinds of mundane reasons can be manufactured to delay or divert a convoy, including planting of intel ( counterintelligence ) which would have been easy.

How would it have been easy?
Once they clue in that every time they use an enigma on it's current setting the Allies seem to know about it, all they would need to do is change the rotor config and the Allies would be locked out again.

That's another supposition. Plus we have to define what is meant by "get into the war". As indicated in previous posts, corporations and banks outside Germany were already manipulating the situation toward war and encouraging politicians to go that route, to the point where German uniforms were being made in British factories, and the Bank of England gave the Nazis tons of gold. Did the Brits get that right too? Would there even have been a war in the first place without the support of big business and banks?

You mean like how ISIS fights with CIA taught tactics?

There's the industry of war. We all are part of that - even Canada, who shockingly sells a lot of arms. Which is why whatshisname said that the biggest threat to freedom was the military-industrial complex.

Why is that?

Because Britain didn't tell the US that they had cracked Enigma, and even after the US found out about it, they wouldn't share intel for months because they didn't trust them with it.

Read the book, it's pretty funny.

But don't watch that stupid U-571 movie. That seriously pissed me off.

It was the Brits and Canadians that did it, America wasn't even involved in the operation.

Just like the real U-571 was sunk by the Aussies.

The film's depiction of American heroics in capturing an Enigma machine angered Britons. The Allies captured Enigma-related codebooks and machines about 15 times during the Second World War. All but two of these actions were by British forces. The Royal Canadian Navy captured U-774 and the U.S. Navy seized U-505 in June 1944. By this time the Allies were already routinely decoding German naval Enigma traffic.

While the United States' direct participation in the Second World War commenced in mid-1941 with Lend-Lease, tactical involvement did not commence until after the Attack on Pearl Harbor, by which time the history of capturing Enigma machines and breaking their codes had already begun in Europe.

An earlier military Enigma machine had been captured by Polish Intelligence in 1928; the Polish Cipher Bureau broke the Enigma code in 1932 and gave their findings to Britain and France in 1939, just before the German invasion of Poland.[7]

The first capture of a naval Enigma machine and associated cipher keys from a U-boat were made on 9 May 1941 by HMS Bulldog ofBritain's Royal Navy, commanded by Captain Joe Baker-Cresswell. The U-boat was U-110. In 1942, the British seized U-559, capturing additional Enigma codebooks. According to Britain's Channel 4, "The captured codebooks provided vital assistance to British cryptographers such as Alan Turing, at the code-breaking facility of Bletchley Park, near Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire."[7]

The capture, rather than sinking, of U-570 – the only ship to be captured by an aircraft – on 27 August 1941 by a Lockheed Hudson from RAF Coastal Command was important for determining the fighting capacity of U-boats, although her crew destroyed the Enigma and cipher information. The boat was towed to port and commissioned into the Royal Navy as HMS Graph.

During Prime Minister's Questions, Tony Blair agreed with questioner Brian Jenkins MP that the film was "an affront" to British sailors.[3] In response to a letter from Paul Truswell,MP for the Pudsey constituency (which includes Horsforth, a town proud of its connection with HMS Aubretia), U.S. president Bill Clinton wrote assuring that the film's plot was only a work of fiction.[8]

Why do Americans want to take credit for everything?

 

[Randall]

How would it have been easy?

Knowing the enemies plans ahead of time provides the reason to implement a contingency plan. A contingency plan isn't hard to work out. It could be as simple as creating a cargo manifest issue that forces scheduling changes, or claiming that a civilian observer had noticed suspicious activity. Besides that, I'm sure that they did develop counterintelligence to throw-off suspicion for the times it was used, so obviously it must have been done.

Once they clue in that every time they use an enigma on it's current setting the Allies seem to know about it, all they would need to do is change the rotor config and the Allies would be locked out again.

Sure, but that still doesn't change the validity of the original point, which was that wars devalue human life to below that of machines. They become simple tools to pull the trigger and if they didn't do that they were derided, imprisoned or executed.

You mean like how ISIS fights with CIA taught tactics? There's the industry of war. We all are part of that - even Canada, who shockingly sells a lot of arms. Which is why whatshisname said that the biggest threat to freedom was the military-industrial complex.

Spot on.

Because Britain didn't tell the US that they had cracked Enigma, and even after the US found out about it, they wouldn't share intel for months because they didn't trust them with it. Read the book, it's pretty funny. But don't watch that stupid U-571 movie. That seriously pissed me off. It was the Brits and Canadians that did it, America wasn't even involved in the operation. Just like the real U-571 was sunk by the Aussies. Why do Americans want to take credit for everything?

What did you think of The Imitation Game?

 

[marduk]

Knowing the enemies plans ahead of time provides the reason to implement a contingency plan. A contingency plan isn't hard to work out. It could be as simple as creating a cargo manifest issue that forces scheduling changes, or claiming that a civilian observer had noticed suspicious activity. Besides that, I'm sure that they did develop counterintelligence to throw-off suspicion for the times it was used, so obviously it must have been done. Sure, but that still doesn't change the validity of the original point, which was that wars devalue human life to below that of machines. They become simple tools to pull the trigger and if they didn't do that they were derided, imprisoned or executed.
Spot on. What did you think of The Imitation Game?

At some point, war becomes math. Can you inflict more casualties and economic damage to the other side than they can accept before they do the same to you?

And like in any good strategy game, one unit has a different strategic value than another.

Non-combatants have an ethical and economic value, but not much of a strategic one.

If you had the stats to show a fighter plane could kill 10 enemy tanks, and 10 enemy tanks could kill 100 of your civilians, would you not let 99 civilians die to save the plane?

I loved that movie by the way.

 

[Han]

I haven't seen the imitation game, just out of interest: is full credit given to the polish mathematicians who did the initial work on enigma?

 

[Han]

Non-combatants have an ethical and economic value, but not much of a strategic one.

I suppose it depends how you define "Combatants" because no factory workers no materiel, also I wonder how saboteurs are counted? as in: are they combatants even though they generally don't take part in "combat" in the traditional sense.

Some of the propaganda I have seen from WWII, told people that working in a factory was as important as fighting on the front line, and everybody had to "Do their bit" etc.

 

[marduk]

I suppose it depends how you define "Combatants" because no factory workers no materiel, also I wonder how saboteurs are counted? as in: are they combatants even though they generally don't take part in "combat" in the traditional sense.

Some of the propaganda I have seen from WWII, told people that working in a factory was as important as fighting on the front line, and everybody had to "Do their bit" etc.

Not sure. I was taking the stance that the economic output of a civilian was for the war effort.