The Gnostic gospel authors would argue with you strenuously on this point given that their work was suppressed so heavily that some of the gospels weren't "rediscovered" for upwards of 1500 years after they were written. The compilation of what we now recognize as the Bible was a heavily political process with big winners and losers and the losers often paid with their lives when they lost those battles over what was real and what was not and what was just inconvenient and therefore easy to change.
Because the West kept him in print. His writings were suppressed in the Sovietn Union and the Eastern Bloc. If we'd lost the Cold War instead of winning his works would have gotten buried in time.
Kept maybe. But God and Alex himself got there in the first place against quite formidable odds n'est-ce pas?
An academic I had the honor of studying under argued that the Second World War was, as he called it, a "War to be Won" and therefore either side could have won or lost. While I think he was/is an excellent historian I think he was wrong. If you look at the industrial statistics it simply doesn't support a Facist victory in WWII. Case in point: From about 1933 to 1945 the Germans produced somewhere around 125,000 planes. In 1944 ALONE the USA produced over 110,000. That ignores a number of other bottlenecks in the war effort such as pilots and fuel. In fact, despite being horribly out produced, Germany and Japan both had thousands of planes available at the end of their respective wars. So producing more planes was mostly valueless unless they were of a superior type (another subject worthy of discussion). Instead they both ran out of trained, quality pilots and the juice to keep the machines in the air. Run out of one and your are screwed; run out of both and it is a serious sign that your entire war effort has been gutted. So this is my long-winded way of agreeing with you BB. The Axis performed amazingly well in WWII but it was unlikely to have gotten much further. Often people look at the mistakes and consider what might have happened if those mistakes were avoided. The problem is that you must ALWAYS factor in a certain amount of mistakes in the Fog of War and decision making. As it turned out the axis had a tremendous run early on and the law of averages simply caught up. I suspect Yamamoto was expecting this to happen when he said he couldn't promise anything more than six months or so or keeping the Americans on their heels. (Can't recall the exact quote, but that was the gist if memory serves.) BTW, as a kid I loved the original Red Dawn. Only years later as when began studying history, the military, etc. and had an understanding of logistics dis I begin to grasp how silly Red Dawn really is. But if the USSR and associated communist states invading the USA was silly, the new Red Dawn is simply laughable. It isn't even a silly concept, it is downright ridiculous that cannot maintain any believable suspension of disbelief.
Which God? And how do you feel about all the loser Gods in history whose word was unchallenged until the next one came along? That's a long list at this point.
The first 3/4 of this post was dead on balls accurate. The last paragraph derailed your train of thought. to wit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_active_United_States_military_aircraft And consider that list is kept in very centralized locations. (some abroad...) A well motivated force could in concert disable this countries air defense. In terms of a continental dispute the Navy is useless. The only thing that keeps the wolves at bay...is the 400 million guns in the hands of 100 million households.
Not at all. Simply feeding (re: logistics) an invasion force across the size of a nation as the USA is a desperately difficult task. Doing so across oceans requires ABSOLUTE control of those oceans. If you are planning on supplying by air then you need ABSOLUTE control of the air, a massive air infrastructure such as air assets and bases, and then those supplies still must be trucked (eg- soft bodied vehicles) to support troops. This ignores the problem that supplying enough soldiers, solely by air, to invade and occupy the USA, is something that no nation on earth has the resources to do. Even if the USAF evaporated and every other nation combined it would be a tall order but I suspect there are just not enough air assets on the planet to support the force that would be required to occupy a nation our size. Now all of this is ONE factor and any bunch of people with IEDs would hurt this operation. If you'd care to dispute this then I'd like you to reference American operations in Iraq and Afghansiastan in recent years. Despite all of this, the USA has far more deployable assets for all of these tasks than any other nation, and more than most any combination of nations we are likely to face. The closure of army bases gives the impression the our assets are too easily attacked due to their collection in a few areas (and some scattered abroad). But this isn't 1941 any longer. The USA, in collusion with Israel, has developed the best anti-missile technology in the world. Consequently, our assets can actually be much better protected, in the long run, but cutting the number of bases and ramping up the defense at each base. Consider which is better: 1. Ten bases each with ten planes, but only one has cutting edge radars, missile and air defense? 2. Two bases with 50 planes each, but both have both cutting edge radars, missile and air defense and possibly even system redundancy. Scenario 1 was better for years because scenario 2 (or something like it) was difficult and not effective. Until a new breakthrough is made scenario 2 is far more effective. In re: to the navy being useless in a continental dispute: first of all, if we are talking about the USA being invaded like I was, then the Navy is a major asset. As I mentioned above, the air option is really only valuable for a limited strike such as controlling a city or a few key cities. If the USA were to be invaded control of the seas must be somehow wrestled from the American Navy. Given that the American Navy has an enviable level of firepower this is unlikely, at best, for any potential invader. You see, even if the invader came across the Canadian or Mexican borders the supplies would not all be provided locally. Not to mention, if we are assuming something like a Red Dawn invasion, then you're talking an eastern hemisphere nation with only modest Western Hemisphere help. By definition this means virtually every soldier, bullet, gun, piece of clothing, everything the invasion needs must cross the ocean or air. That will be a LOT of opportunities to destroy staging areas back in the country of origin, sink ships in transit (or shoot down planes), ano just basically force any invader to use a massive proportion of their deployable assets merely to protect their logistical train. In the end the NRA likes to think it is preserving American freedom, but I will take the actual United States armed forces against our adversaries every time, thank you very much. Our military is very expensive, but it is very, very good, and we have fewer weaknesses than people realize. Unfortunately, those are often weaknesses that military strength does little to help assuage, such as 9/11 style terrorism.
LMAO! Nice retort! However, you have to admit that immigration (legal or illegal) isn't exactly a military invasion. Then again I guess some peeps do think of this as an invasion of sorts.....
On the subject of pilots I am familiar with the Japanese situation. The US airmen would be rotate home after a certain period where they would crucially assist in training new pilots. The Japanese pilots would stay in service until, for most of them, they would be killed. Their training effort was badly hampered by comparison. Add in the significant losses at Midway o their top carrier pilots, even some at Coral Sea, and they never really got back to their post Pear Harbor level.
The Japanese saw pilots who had been shot down as failed warriors. They didn't try to rescue them the way the Allies did in the Pacific. This led directly to the Kamikaze strategy because all the Japanese had by that stage of the war were raw pilots right out of flight school because they'd lost most of their good ones in the air battles before that.
The US nuclear deterrent is in the unusual position of being used mainly to defend territory far removed from the US mainland. This is an asymmetry that isn't considered often enough in evaluating the stalemate that the Cold War produced. MAD was a threat to both superpowers but the tactical use of nuclear weaponry was going to hurt the Soviets far more than the US. This made the threat of tactical nuclear warfare a major problem that the Soviets were never able to work around in their planning for an invasion of NATO territory. A local commander who was given weapons-free status over his tactical stockpile might choose to strike hundreds of kilometers behind the lines to disrupt supply, communications and general logistics and fulfill his assigned duties. We're going to have to figure out how to have a nuclear stand down at some point. There's no way we survive centuries of nuclear stand-off without the flame deluge happening eventually. It's just human nature to fall into the trap of using whatever weapons are available when the situation becomes grim or when it is perceived to be really grim.
Yes. There is merit to the notion that Japan's warrior mentality worked against a more rational approach the war.
Exactly! The Germans and Japanese were very similar in their outlook toward creating pools of pilots. They basically kept driving their best pilots until they died instead of using their skills and experience to train more pilots. Also, especially early on, they tended to believe that fewer really good pilots was better than a larger pool of adequate pilots. The USA took the attitude of quantity over quality. However, rotating the best pilots in and out allowed quality to build up over time and gave the USA the best of both worlds. Of course, it could be argued that much of the axis policy was really dictated by the lack of fuel. They realized that training thousands of "extra" pilots was going to costs immense quantities of fuel that neither Germany nor Japan had. So while we criticize the decision to build smaller corps of pilots for their respective air arms, I am not sure either was in a position to do what the allies did. It was a simple matter of resources. And THIS is the sort of issue that brings us back to why the Axis wouldn't have won in the long run. It was only a matter of time. As a neat aside: when the USAAF was ramping up the training of pilots during WWII it was expected that the best pilots would be more technically inclined people; people who understood the plane and so on. This wasn't true at all. The best fighter pilots turned out to be hunters. The skill most needed of a WWII pilot was to be able to lead your prey while it is moving. This is a difficult skill to master and even more difficult when you're moving as well. However, people who were long time hunters already knew the concept of leading with their shot, timing, anticipating movements, ambush and aggression, etc. So it was hunters that made the best fighters pilots. Just teach them to fly and let them loose. The USA and Russia having such strong hunting culture helped both countries to use these skillsets and convert them into wartime use. I think Hobbes will particularly find that interesting.....
