Military Advantage Quotes
This is one of the best summaries of Lincoln’s early strategic thinking about the war. Unfortunately for him and the country, his generals were all trained in tactics rather than strategy. And the then modern world placed industry, logistics, and economics on a par with battlefield tactics. Until Generals Grant and Sherman were elevated to higher command, there were no military leaders who thought about the war in overall strategic terms. Lincoln, Grant, and Sherman in a sense created the first strategic approach to modern warfare.
This was one of the perceived advantages of the South—that the North, with its more complex and sophisticated society, would pay a higher economic price by fighting than the South would. Southern whites didn’t work or farm much and they could fight and the older men and slaves could keep the agriculture and economy going. However, the huge superiority of the North in productivity and technology, in farming, manufacturing, transportation and military offset the Southern advantage do a great degree. But when the North attracted so many of the Southern Negro slaves to their lines, the Southern labor force was diminished greatly for the first time. And Sherman’s March showed how the entire Southern economy could be crippled and the war was strategically lost by the Confederates. The reality of superiority of the North and the attitude of elites like Emerson in freely discussing that fact, was resented by Southerners then and since. There is to this day a Southern resentment of intellectuals and highly educated people—a vestige of the reality of differences existing in the 1860s and since. It was not until the 1950s that the South started developing educational and cultural institutions and populace that is on a par with the rest of the nation. But the states which spend less per capita on educational and cultural institutions, tend to have the poorest educational attainments of their citizens and they are mostly states of the deep South where values are still somewhat different from the North.
Although this may seem obvious to most, there has been, in recent years, an attempt by some to introduce the concept of proportionality into the war equation and definition of war crime. Defense after attack many argue should be proportional to the attack. So if Nation A shoots down a plane of Nation B, according to this logic Nation B is not supposed to invade nation A. Brecher points out the absurdity of the concept from a war point of view. It is however used by many to criticize the defenses against terrorism where modern weapons are used against terrorists and those that harbor them.
Israel's Arab enemies do not simply want to control the territory and/or the economic resources. Their aim, overtly stated thousands of times since the formation of Israel, is to "drive the Jews into the sea", murder the population, obtain revenge for their percieved humiliation that "foreigners" to the region and their religion could build a society so far advanced compared to Arabs on the harsh land abd without any of the oil riches that some of the Arab states had. Israel has won all the wars that the Arabs have initiated, and never murdered the population, and provide the "occupied territiries" with better medicine and infrastructure than the Arabs achieve on their own.
A terrorist organization. Yassin was killed in a high tech Israeli Military operation.
