Two Israeli soldiers found guilty of using human shields

^^

I was very specifically referring to winning without giving a shit about ethical and moral constraints being more effective, though the reason we do that besides the constraints themselves is the unknown variable of someone taking sides with your enemy out of sympathy for their plight.

I'd rather end if efficiently and quickly. It might cost more lives in the short run, but cost less in comparison to the protracted war it could be, especially to my own side.

I'm not being realistic to our worlds practicality, I'm more talking about what would be most practical if you didn't have to care about those things.

And to stay on topic, I'm personally not terribly bugged with the concept those Israeli's came up with, and neither are we in our own history, as since someone mentioned we used to use prisoners to check for traps.

edited 3rd Oct '10 8:15:58 PM by Barkey

Yes, and that was totally humane and reasonable. You know what? You two can go fuck yourselves. I'm not going to argue morals with people who obviously have none.

If the entire US military thinks like you two do, then the US does not deserve to survive as a state.

edited 3rd Oct '10 8:32:19 PM by BonSequitur

Not that you took the time to have any empathy for people who are on the other side of those bombs.

And to stay on topic, I'm personally not terribly bugged with the concept those Israeli's came up with, and neither are we in our own history, as since someone mentioned we used to use prisoners to check for traps.

And it was a shitty thing to do back then, too.

So was the war, war is shitty.

Let their traps kill their own people. Fuck knows they care even less about their own when they start detonating suicide vests in crowded marketplaces.

Once again, this thread is why I dislike the whole situation in the Middle East.

Yes, because they are subhuman. Why spend millions building bomb-detection robots, when you can just send in the brown people.

It has everything to do with it being their own people. The entire point is that it sends them a message "Stop the bombs, you'll only kill your own kind."

It has nothing to do with them being brown, or being less than human, it has everything to do with them being the same people that the enemy also hides behind.

You want to shoot at us from your homes and then when we bust in find you sitting quietly with your family playing innocent? Well if you can hide behind them, we can use them too.

edited 3rd Oct '10 8:47:55 PM by Barkey

Yes, because if I shove you onto a landmine, whomever laid the mine is guilty.

If your side laid down the landmine, then yeah.(or in your hypothetical situation, my side laid it down, and I was taken prisoner)

edited 3rd Oct '10 8:50:09 PM by Barkey

No. No it doesn't. That's completely bizarre. Not to mention that in the very real situation involved, there's no 'their side,' there's a child being pushed into a possible booby trap for being in the wrong ethnic group at the wrong time.

I'd say it's more or less living in the same community as the enemy, not ethnic group.

It pretty much consists of using the same damn ethics as the enemy, I don't agree with this war, but the reason we're losing is this stupid fucking code they do not have to follow.

This post was thumped by the Shillelagh of Whackingness

I never asked for anything, I just don't like double standards of ethics.

but the reason we're losing is this stupid fucking code they do not have to follow

He Who Fights Monsters, dude.

^ Exactly. Should we become exactly like those who we are fighting? I should think not.

edited 3rd Oct '10 9:02:07 PM by rmctagg09

If the only alternative is losing, do you lose?

This floundering around uselessly dying is ridiculous, either we do what it takes to win, or we get the fuck out. Either is equally appealing to me.

edited 3rd Oct '10 9:05:58 PM by Barkey

Barkey.. no.
Even putting morals aside it's not an always working strategy. Sure, if you assume there to be only two countries in the world, with no emotional attachement between people of the two different populations, and you are part of the superior country, then you would be right. But that's not reality.
I think I need to explain this in an abstract way. Assume there is a network with N nodes, each node connected to k other nodes. Let's further group the nodes into different regions, and a subset of such regions start with a group of nodes within that region as "tainted". Let's further assume if a node gets destroyed, each nearby node can get "tainted" as well. The probability is p1 if the destroyed node was "tainted", and p2 >= p1 when the destroyed node wasn't "tainted".

Ok, that's the model, I will start with p1=p2=1 as an example. Your strategy to get rid of the tainted nodes is to destroy any region that contains tainted nodes iteratively. I think it's pretty clear that this will result in every single node in the network being destroyed.
The nodes obviously represent humans, the regions could for example represent villages. p2 represents the propability that someone will take up the fight if an innocent gets killed that is known by the remaining humans, while p1 represents the propability if an insurgent gets killed.

So, let's go more concrete, and a little more detailed with the model. I'd say your changes of a specific person killed being an innocent when you take the approach of nuking whole villages are no less than 50%. I'll assume p1 as 10% and p2 as 80%, and k as 8. So if you kill a random node within the partially tainted region the propability that a specific connected node gets tainted is 0.5*0.1+0.5*0.8 = 0.45. So on average of those 8 people 3.6 will take up the fight. So that means you kill one tainted node (=two in total) and you get 7.2 new tainted ones! Awesome. Of course neither k, nor p1, p2 are constant, so late me make a different example:

If no one will take up the fight if you kill someone who fights already (i.e. p1 = 0) and no less than only 1 in 8 will take up the fight if you kill an innocent (friend/child) aquaintance, that will net you, on average 8*(0.5*0 + 0.5 * 1/8) = 0.5 tainted nodes per node destroyed, or 2*0.5 = 1 tainted node per tainted node destroyed. Meaning, if you start out with a sufficiently large number of tainted nodes, you would still burn the whole world almost guaranteed, including your own country, when consequently applying your approach. Note that if you reduce the propability that an untainted node gets destroyed largely, for example by not using kids to search for booby traps, you can severely change the result. (Also a said note, I'm using the relative distribution instead of the propability for calculating how many nodes will be affected by each iteration - according to the initial model it could happen, also unlikely that no additional node gets tainted. But, when starting with a high enough number of tainted nodes like 50000, the propability of it happening similar to the relative distribution approaches 1)

The short version:
Your strategy doesn't fucking work.
[edit]
Argh, now I forgot to make a clarification - it's not that your strategy is guaranteed to fail, it's that without reasonable information on the motivations of people who fight you have no way to reliable judge p1 or p2, and you cannot know if it will succeed or not.

edited 3rd Oct '10 9:16:19 PM by Uchuujinsan

Well apparently you're the expert.

There isn't a math formula for psychological warfare.

It also relies on the fact that at some point you either run out of people willing to fight because they know what will happen, or you run out of villages. Either is Endgame.

edited 3rd Oct '10 9:11:31 PM by Barkey

When I first saw the title I was under the impression that they were clearing houses with children strapped to their chests, but now I know that that's not true. Sure it might not be the nicest or most politically correct thing to do; but from a military standpoint it was a logical choice.

^^
1 minute 30 seconds to read through all of it, understand it, form reasonable criticism and then dismiss it. I am impressed.

You act like an operation is regionally confined ("run out of villages"). It is not. The "insurgents" will run out of villages if you are living in the last one - and you destroy it.

I did read it more thoroughly afterwards, and came to the same conclusions.

Where the fuck did you dug up statistics like that from?

Out of your ass, that's where. And then you say the whole thing doesn't work when it was a conceptual theory, and you came out with an equation with incorrect or at least unknown variables.

I'm not using any statistics, so I don't see your point. Ok, you were probably trying to say that I pulled the values of p1, p2 and k out of my ass. Which is true. And is missing my point. So, I think either I suck at communicating or you still didn't read it thoroughly enough.

But you know, at least I learned something from this.

No guarantees on writing something else in this thread.

Re. The USA civil war example, that was a limited thing done by Sherman army against the local confederate rebels in Georgia. It was pretty local AFAIK and used against land mines after some union soldiers stepped on em. They had the confederates POWs dig up the mines and no pow was killed. The insurgents and the general of the formal [csa] army stopped once Sherman told them that would happen again.

Of course, Sherman is also well known for burning several confederate cities down and looting and pillaging sections of Georgia and the carolinas.

edited 3rd Oct '10 11:29:26 PM by BalloonFleet

"When I first saw the title I was under the impression that they were clearing houses with children strapped to their chests, but now I know that that's not true. Sure it might not be the nicest or most politically correct thing to do; but from a military standpoint it was a logical choice."

Long term it sure as hell isn't. What would you do if your kid/sibling was used in such a fashion? Hint, it isn't going to engender you to Israel.