[Dragon]

Very true.

[Nuclear1]

Alright Lib, I had a long-winded angry ranting post to answer yours, but because I'm getting so tired of responding to your inane repetition of right-wing pundits, I'm just going to sum it up:

Total war is wrong.  Total war punishes innocent people under the guise of punishing the perpetrators of the war.

You're right, you don't find a conventional war against a hidden enemy.  You get the population on your side and against the hidden enemy.  This is best accomplished by not using "any means necessary"--carpetbombing entire neighborhoods or dislocating entire populations to find some terrorists.

**** you and your attacks on political correctness.  We live in one of the most self-centered societies on Earth, where people are murderously competitive over careers and relationships, and where people making money look to keep making it, even if it screws millions of people.  Welfare and government programs exist to keep your losers from falling into poverty and disenfranchisement--key causes of crime and terrorism.  

Good God, man...

[TrashMan]

War is hell. Ever heard that one?
Survival is all that matters.

Besides, who cares about the smurfycats?
PURGE THE XENOS!!!

[General Battuta]

So, uh, Lib, let's say you want to use the Orion to kill the terrorists.

Let's say the terrorists have infiltrated major US cities (as they like to do.)

Are you seriously going to take out Chicago, Washington, New York, Boston, whatever in order to nail them?

And if your answer is 'no', why the hell can you do the same to Kabul, Islamabad, whatever?

These guys don't always (or even usually) live in the middle of nowhere. They live in cities and towns with jobs, girlfriends, and families. They're indistinguishable from normal citizens to the casual inspection.

This is what you don't understand about terrorism:

Terrorists are criminals. They are not warriors. They are not soldiers. They are honorless, disreputable criminals. They deserve to be hunted down and brought to justice by police, using police tactics. Fighting a 'war' against them gives them legitimacy that allows them to recruit new followers.

[The E]

Agreed. Dignifying them by sending an Army to hunt them gives them more credit than they deserve.

[General Battuta]

This is one of the big advantages to SpecOps teams. Quiet, dirty, and inglorious.

It's hard to recruit new sods for your Glorious Jihad when there's no war going on - when all you've got to look forward to is the prospect of being snatched by some tech ninjas or suffering random unpredictable death by drone.

In any case, Liberator's 'nuke 'em all' approach is strongly disliked by our soldiers in the field. Instead, our soldiers - who have been weaning themselves off airstrikes and artillery - try to earn the trust and respect of the locals, so that they, in turn, will point out weapon caches and turn in suspects. In short, our troops are learning to work like detectives.

Even if you had an Orion in orbit right now, it would do no good in the 'global action against terrorism' or whatever they're calling it these days, except presumably as a surveillance platform. Better to use it for something awesome.

[The E]

Another measure would be to replace the word "Terrorist" with "Idiot" in the news.

[General Battuta]

Hahah, yes. 'Criminal', anything like that. They feed on glorification.

[Colonol Dekker]

Assuming 75% of an orions crew are fit for urban combat. I can't see a reason why it couldn't just park up and drop some ramps and open the airlocks.
 
See how they fare against man-portable ML-16s.

[General Battuta]

It'd just be Fallujah all over again. They leave, they come back when you're gone (if you can even tell them from the innocent citizens in the first place.) Worse yet, all the disruption causes resentment, and the civilians start helping the bad guys out.

[Snail]

Why can't we all be friends?

[MatthTheGeek]

Because it would make for poor video games.

[Nuclear1]

War is hell. Ever heard that one?
Survival is all that matters.

That's funny, I'd love to hear about your military background Trash!

Oh wait, none?  That's what I thought.  You speak exactly like someone who has no idea how to run a war, and whose closest experience with war comes from a video game.  

Well here's a ****ing news flash for you, buddy--people who die in war aren't just graphics on a screen, they have friends, a family, pets, people who care about them and will be devastated by their death.  Houses aren't square boxes with hitpoints--they're somebody's home, where people grew up, fell in love, married, and watched their children take their first steps.  And the landscape isn't just a wonderfully-rendered warzone--it's a place that can be hurt and can bleed just like a human being when war is brought to it; fields will never grow flowers again, forests will never recover, and swamplands will remain dry.  

The world has already realized "war is hell"--that's why people who aren't bloody morons oppose it at every turn, and if it must be undertaken as a last resort, abide by the rules and laws of war that make us civilized.  But since you have zero military background, I'm betting you have no idea how it feels to know you're actually taking a life, that no matter what that person has done in their life to warrant an airstrike or a platoon of Marines kicking down their door, there'll still be someone to cry over them and whose life will never be the same.

"War is hell"...what an ignorant asshole.

[Liberator]

I wasn't talking about the war particularly, I mentioned it, but I was talking about Victory in general.

If you are going to apply a "Shock and Awe" type strategy, the shock needs to be so suitably awe inspiring as to make your foes believe that you cannot be defeated.  The last time that I recall that happening on this planet was World War 2, with the dropping of the atom bomb.

On topic with the whole Orion vs. Terrorist thing, beams are terribly precise(unless it's the horrific LTSlash), so if you locate a building or buildings where the terrorists are firing on friendlies that building doesn't exist any more, period.

And the thing where you can't sanitize an area because there are innocents in the area is a bogus standard to hold any military up to, if they're heinous enough to use civvies as shields, well it's just too bad for the civvies.  But the objective of the propaganda department should be to direct the disgust over a village or a city block being leveled toward the reason it was leveled, not the people who did the leveling.

I'm gonna be honest, I'm a cold hearted bastard about this stuff, because it's a cold, harsh thing and you can't let sentimentality get in the way or you are going to lose.

Lastly, I'm all for letting them rot in their rotted little country, except we can't, we saw what happened on 9/11/2001 when we let things stand a little too long.  You want innocents to stop dying for doing something like going to school or the mall or a night club?  You bury these bastards as deep as you can for as long as it takes for them to realize that blowing up children or other innocent people is wrong no matter why you do it.

[General Battuta]

Okay, again, you realize that what you're saying here directly contraindicates the strategies our soldiers in the field have been switching to?

'Shock and awe' is obsolete and ineffective. Our own troops gave up on it.

This kind of armchair general behavior is doubly odd, since if you'd taken the time to speak to any of our soldiers, or to listen to our commanders and generals, you would know that things have changed.

All your ideas are nice in an ideal theoretical kind of way but the fact is that they don't work and we've moved past them. We don't even use air support and artillery most of the time any more.

In order to win, we need to be The Good Guys. We need the Pakistanis and Afghans and Iraqis to think we're The Good Guys. And the only way we manage that is by not blowing up their homes and families. Otherwise, we just create more terrorists with every action.

[Spoon]

Liberator has a good point. If it was in a scenario similar to WW2
It just doesn't apply at all to the current warfare in the middle east, afghanistan, iraq etc etc.

Also I chuckled a little at the idea of using a LTSlash in a big city. "Oops, we just accidently a whole city block"

[Colonol Dekker]

For the record, just to cover myself. . . .
 
The British Army use both the laws of armed conflict (those which terrorists fail to follow earning them the title in the first place) and specialised values and standards.
 
 
My views above do not reflect the Army and are voiced in relation to a hypothetical situation in which a make-believe 2K spaceship is brought to bear on an unspecified terrorist group and are purely for entertainment purposes.
 
 

[General Battuta]

Liberator has a good point. If it was in a scenario similar to WW2
It just doesn't apply at all to the current warfare in the middle east, afghanistan, iraq etc etc.

Also I chuckled a little at the idea of using a LTSlash in a big city. "Oops, we just accidently a whole city block"

Right. War today is vastly different from war between nation-states in the 1940s. Which is why I keep trying to explain to Liberator that it's not a war, it's a police action. I don't understand why he wants to give the terrorists what they want by legitimizing them as soldiers. They're just common criminals. Even their most devastating attacks were hardly significant; taking down a few buildings is nothing compared to what happens in real war.

Plus, given their yield beams would take out whole cities. Thus why the Lucifer uses them for planetary bombardment.

[Nuclear1]

Shut the **** up, Lib.

We don't sanitize areas with innocent people in them because the concept of proportionality is a key element of the Law of Armed Conflict, which members of the military are bound to uphold under penalty of court martial.  Not to mention the simple moral side that blowing up innocent people because there happens to be some of the true bad guys in there makes us no better than the terrorists.

And the thing where you can't sanitize an area because there are innocents in the area is a bogus standard to hold any military up to, if they're heinous enough to use civvies as shields, well it's just too bad for the civvies.

Congratulations.  How long have you been a member of al-Qaeda?

Lastly, I'm all for letting them rot in their rotted little country, except we can't, we saw what happened on 9/11/2001 when we let things stand a little too long.

No, 9/11/2001 was the result of us dicking around in their countries and being dangerously shortsighted with our decisions overseas and allowing poverty and conditions ideal for terrorism to fester.  Strangely enough, bombing entire neighborhoods tends to make things worse, not better.  

You want to stop terrorism?  Go to its source.  Stop upholding dictatorships overseas and do everything humanly possible to improve the economic conditions for people in those countries.  Leadership doesn't like the US?  Too ****ing bad.  Nelson Mandela was no friend of America, but you're not going to see South African terrorists attack us.  The Saudi government on the other hand, loves us, but the majority of the 9/11 hijackers were Saudi.  Part of being the world's sole superpower means more than being a cop and being there in a time of war, it means making the world a place worth living in during peace.

[General Battuta]

The best thing we ever did in the War on Terror was helping out tsunami victims. That was a tremendous, tremendous coup for the US, because it made us the good guys again in the eyes of lots of people.

Did more damage to Al-Qaeda than any number of assassinations or arrests.