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Skolloc753 t1_jdaq9xa wrote

Lets talk about a strictly hypothetical war, because I would think that you have a rather romantic conception of modern war.

  • Big evil country A, whose political, cultural and religious propaganda advocates genocide of less value races, invades little innocent country B.
  • To prove its moral superiority it disables the outclassed forces of country B ... while building camps on where to concentrate the population of country B for tourism processing. You know, free rides to the east.
  • Your choice as country B:
  • "well, they foamed our troops, so we better surrender and volunteer for camp, concentrated tourism service".

or

  • "Most searched internet request: how to build molotov cocktails?"

People do not give up when peacefully disabled if the enemy is not trustworthy enough. Unfortunately todays modern conflict have proven that a lot of nations are very untrustworthy when it comes to being good winners or accepting a fair defeat. War is only under very specific circumstances a sport event or a romantic comedy. In many other cases it is a desperate struggle for the survival of your country, your loved ones, your culture, your language and your right to drive on the wrong side of the road. And no country is going to stop its war for survival just because their soldiers got foamed.

What you describe is the hope for police / peacekeeping services, where other considerations like civilian casualties play a key considerations, or a very one-sided conflict. It has nothing to do with a near-peer conflict. Near-peer conflicts is about annihilation of enemy forces with firepower which today can hit a car after being fired 5000km away, kill everything due to fragments in a 200m radius and got its latest fire solution from a 5000 USD DIY drone from China.

How do you stop (permanently) a cruise missile fired 1000km away targeting a hospital? How do you stop (reliably) a main battle tank. How a typhooon class submarine with 20 ICBMs and several dozen of megaton nuclear fireworks 100m under the surface?

Our technology is not even slightly there. It is actually pretty easy to kill and destroy something. It is actually incredibly hard to safely disable something, including a human, and even todays LTL tech like gas, electro shocks or microwave cookers can easily injure and, when used on a mass scale, kill, simply because humans react very differently.

When you have solved that, then we can talk about infantry disabling warfare.

SYL

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