this post was submitted on 10 Oct 2023
112 points (99.1% liked)

Ukraine

8235 readers
746 users here now

News and discussion related to Ukraine

*Sympathy for enemy combatants is prohibited.

*No content depicting extreme violence or gore.

*Posts containing combat footage should include [Combat] in title

*Combat videos containing any footage of a visible human must be flagged NSFW


Donate to support Ukraine's Defense

Donate to support Humanitarian Aid


founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] [email protected] -2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Only by those who can afford otherwise.

During total war you see those attitudes dissolve.

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

During a total war any reasonable military will prioritise destroying their enemies capacity to wage war. That typically includes prioritising munition spending on military targets.

Bombing a civilian city centre can be demoralising, but history shows that it primarily serves to harden your enemies resolve, because you are explicitly showing that you are willing to harm the civilian friends and families of those fighting or otherwise supporting the war effort.

The bombing of Hiroshima/Nagasaki is a prominent counter-example of this though, where the weapons used were so completely terrifying that they helped convince Japanese leadership that their entire nation could be wiped out if they didn't capitulate. Still: there are strong arguments to suggest Japan would have capitulated anyway. Note that even though other bombing campaigns killed more people than the nukes, they didn't cause a capitulation.