Ron Paul: "We Spent a Billion Dollars Fighting the Houthis…and Lost'
(ronpaulinstitute.org)
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There's simply no way to beat swarms of drones and anti-ship missiles without having unlimited interceptors or mounting a massive ground invasion and killing all the guys who aim the drones and missiles. We opted to spend billions of dollars emptying out all our stockpiles for Ukraine to drive into minefields and shoot at schools in Donetsk instead of developing better drone stoppers.
Why hello there, Curtis LeMay. By your logic, the Mongols, Assyrians, and Ottomans should still be here. They ain't.
"Well, just kill civilians" doesn't actually do much. In a lot of cases, you just strengthen the legitimacy of the government you're fighting.
Those WW2 & Korea tactics barely worked at the time, and were one of the reasons we lost in Vietnam. We dropped more bombs in Vietnam then in both theaters of WW2. LeMay leveled the entirety of North Korea. Literally all of it. Literally: you had Raiders looking for random barns to bomb because every standing structure had already been hit. All it eventually did was provoke a response from China, causing a draw, and a war that isn't even officially over yet.
As for WW2, not only were the daylight bombing campaigns really only for accuracy's sake, but the their casualties were enormous. Switch to night-time bombing campaigns, and you lose the accuracy. Despite us having no reservation against bombing civilian targets, it was predominantly to stop the factories from getting workers. Even with all of that, German records indicate that the bombing did very little to stop German production. The NatSocs on this board will claim that that allied blockades and bombing were what caused the famines that Germany plundered Europe to stop, but none of it's true, according to the Germans themselves. The greatest economic damage done to Germany was done by Socialist policies. The total war bombing campaign against Germany and Japan was generally ineffective at achieving the strategic level victories that were needed. And that is the most successful Total War bombing campaigns we've ever had. It only gets worse from there.
Total War, typically, doesn't actually help your cause, doesn't secure your victories, and doesn't gain you anything in the end. If you want to fight an offensive total war, you might as well just not fight. It's cheaper and you're better off.