A soldier so brave he doesnt need a gun.

I mean your all correct after a mannor. I would rather fight regular Russian soldiers than say a batallion of Spetznas, but you know that goes with out saying I guess. Samething maybe you are saying, a name will precede you in combat look at the germans that named the marines Devil Dogs, anyway also look at MMA you know, a guy is on top only for so long then he is quickly challanged.

 

Well if you are Switzerland you threaten to liquidate all their finances...that'll work better than any gun!

 

You tell that to a man pointing a .45 at you!

 

Generally speaking a man pointing a .45 isn't much of a factor in invading a country....unless it was Chuck Norris of course

 

Pretty sure it would work in France

 

Lmao!!!

 

You do realise if people fear you then that can increase your chance of being attacked? I mean according to this little link global terrorism has increased by 4x since the Iraq Invasion: http://reliefweb.int/report/world/2012-global-terrorism-index-capturing-impact-terrorism-2002-2011

People who feel threatened are going to lash out, and they will lash out at the people who they feel threatened by. A sound self-protection strategy on both a national and personal level is to find the biting point between being able to handle yourself and not presenting yourself in a way that others will percieve as confrontational.

 

Chuck Norris would give you the 45 just for the sport.

Back on thread, what i understood from the original post was his interpretation of a sentence in Sun Tzu. What the sentence means is that the soldier who doesn't need to use the gun is the better one. You had alot of examples of this happening throughout history. One of these examples was I as mentioned, the italian wars where opposing mercenary armies would attwck communications and baggage trains forcing the other side to retreat without ever engaging in direct combat. Of course when the French army under chales XII attacked, they were pretty much hopeless as the french army lived off the land. And had a doctrine thwt allowed them to do so. Which meant that direct combat was innevitable. Still when the french army was retreating the Italian soldiers kept attacking and killing whatever straglers they could find.

Another example of strategical supremacy was the Napoleonic invasion of Russia in which the scorched earth policy of the Russian troops meant that Napoleon could not supply himself locally, had to deploy a lot of his troops defending their communication lines which were always under threat and, in the encounters with the Russians spend their precious supplies. At Borodino, the Russian general still had reserves but decided to retreat due to the simple fact that it was more damaging for the French to move forward than being forced to retreat.

That is the thing. And switzerland has 5 million soldiers in a montaneous country very easy to defend. Sending an invading army there would be a waste of men, and money. Imagine afghanistan but with better technology. Ouch!

So, all in all, sun tzu is still relevant and still applicable in today's warfare. War is just faster and at longer range than in his day and age.

Edit: france in WW2 is a perfect example that military might means nothing without proper strategical reconing. By 1940, france had a bigger army than germany, with more tanks, better equiped airforce, better navy. Still, when the germans broke through the ardenes, they not only isolated most of the french troops in Belgium as they also broke the concentration area of their mechanized and armour reserves. Leading to the french being unable to mount a counterattack without reorganising. And obviously, reorganising with tanks racing through your country is not going to work very well. When the english and french mounted a proper counterattack the result was the near defeat of the german forces holding the region around luxemburg and strasbourg. If it weren' for a certain erwin rommel using the 88 AA guns agsinst the british Matilda 1s the germans could've been cutoff and the french front reestablished. Quite a different result he?

 

Of course Sun Tzu is still relavent, anyone who has read that manuel knows it is relavent. My favorite part of that book talkes about spies, mis information is just as good as haveing a spi in your enimies war council, thats good stuff man.

 

are you typing on a phone with non functioning autocorrect by chance? because your spelling is atrocious.

 

It always has been, thats the manner in which I roll, lols.

 

The former - I don't think we're going to break the c barrier, but hey, who knows.

So the launch is highly visible, but we'd have no idea whether it's an interstellar spaceship, a probe or a weapon. It could also change trajectory very easily and semi stealthily on the way. Furthermore, there's no reason to assume that it would need to arrive in one piece. Once it gets up to that speed it could flechette into a few thousand pieces, each one of which could be absolutely devastating.

I guess my thought was that if they try to communicate with us, they've launched a probe (which could easily be mistaken for an r-bomb), that probe takes a certain amount of time to reach us, then, once it does reach us, the signal it sends back will also take a significant amount of time to reach them. Within that time there's ample opportunity for an alien civilization to send something back with us.

Shameful secret - I've used wikipedia to prepare for presentations and such in the past. The dark truth of science is that a lot of us use wikipedia as a source. I didn't mean that every extinction of megafauna must be caused by humans, just that, as humans migrated we left a trail of extinction in our wake. On pretty much every continent we went to.

I like the idea of the deadman's switch. I think it's a good answer to this. But the fact is, even if you manage to destroy your enemy, your civilization is still dead. What's even the point then? Better to nip the threats in the bud, destroy those humble beginnings of interstellar civilizations and keep yourself safe. I suppose there's an argument to be made that you'd be better off staying radio silent and not launching your little death demons, but hey, maybe that's a reason for the whole Fermi paradox in the first place.

 

Okay, these arguments do make sense.

In a lot of cases, striking "first" might not give you much more security.

Dragging the conversation around a bit, a point which I find interesting is our ability to empathize with aliens. Most SF portrays aliens as being fundamentally human-like, in behavior as well as appearance. Even alien-looking aliens tend to exhibit human-like behavior. But beyond a few basic traits (which we still don't have a good grasp of in humans) which would allow them to form a technological civilization it is unlikely that this would be remotely true. In that case the decision to preemptively annihilate them would be, I think, much more likely than most people would realize.

My opinion of Wikipedia is that it's generally reliable, especially in math and physics (which is where I would be trying to use it academically in the past). The problem is that there is no guarantee, so it's good to be able to double check what it says. I remember hearing a story of a lecturer at my Alma Mater editing the wiki page for an essay topic just before the essay was due. Pure evil, but it proves a point.

I don't know about in North America, but there isn't actually any evidence that Australians hunted the megafauna. And since most of them were already extinct by the time people showed up it's argued that they were already on the way out. Even so, I don't think there are many people who would argue that humans didn't play any role.

 

Yeah, I mean, as long as we're imagining outlandish scenarios, there's every possibility that when you find a civilization that might one day be a threat, you launch your r-bombs and such, but that civ has colonized asteroids and comets that you had no way of anticipating and now there's a bunch of colonies that know where you are and have a bone to pick with you. Might send some r-bombs back your way too!

Maybe I'm guilty of myopic thinking here, but I would assume that biology would function basically the same on other planets. Even when you look at animals that have taken radically different evolutionary paths than us, you see similar sorts of behavior and evolutionary strategies. There's no reason that ant trail behavior should tell us about human traffic patterns beyond the fact that nature cruelly optimizes for efficiency. Rather than give us a common ground to work from though, I think it would push us towards the decision to 'nuke' em as soon as possible.

My feeling on human level intelligence is that it's as rare as sauropods. Sauropods are the dinosaurs that you kind of associate with… y'know, DINOSAURS, just incredibly large, long necked animals like Apatosaurus, Diplodocus, Brachiosaurus, etc. Never before or after have land animals reached their titanic size or lived in their numbers, and we had millions of them. Vast herds of warm blooded, constantly eating machines. Although this represented an extremely viable ecological strategy, the confluence of factors that enabled these guys to enact that strategy have never been seen again.

Human level intelligence seems just that rare - there's no real reason other taxonomic branches (cephalopods, whales, parrots, dinosaurs, etc.) couldn't have reached that level, it's just that they didn't, so my guess is that it's extraordinarily rare in the galaxy.

LOL, I knew a dude who told this girl that Madonna had worked as a chef at my undergraduate institution, he edited the wiki entry and for three months this woman went around telling everyone that it had happened!

Sounds about right - during most of human colonization there was a giant climate shift, which could have contributed to these extinction events, but still, the continents that didn't have people invading didn't have the extinction events. Might be a straw that broke the camel's back scenario. I was living in Australia for a bit as a kid, and I remember reading a fable about how goanna used to be giant and venomous, and people tricked him into giving up his venom and becoming small. I didn't really think anything of it, until I read that there did indeed use to be a giant varanid lizard (Megalania, I think) and most paranoids possess the precursors to both venom and venom glands.