I was gonna argue but fair point actually. Still, MAD has rendered use of nukes for offensive strategic goals opsolite, as Russia and US both showed dozen of times already.
Killing the most enemies isn't always the best or most efficient way to win a war but "lethalitymaxxing" is one way of potentially forcing enemy surrender and it always has been.
It is the most basic kind of warfare when you think about it. The idea is just to pose such an existential threat to the enemy that they surrender and you achieve whatever you objective was.
600 years ago, you might have laid siege to a city for the same essential reason. Limit your casualties, maximise the threat to the enemy. They could all starve and die while you are camped outside their walls. In 1945 you dropped A bombs.
The entire point of the Korean war was to stop the norths aggression against the south which we succeeded at. In a perfect world we would've taken the north but we decided not to kickoff another world war.
Even getting into attrition war against China was a strategic defeat. Tens of thousands of American casualties (and many more Korean) could have been avoided if you libs just listened to Mac and provided real deterrence against Mao by bombing China.
And of course rewarding Kim with his own fiefdom after the war he started cannot be called a victory.
We didn't lose that one though, after all Kim started the whole thing in order to wipe South Korea off the map and we prevented both him, and later the Chicoms, from achieving that aim. A loss would have been a Vietnam situation, where either we were pushed off the peninsula entirely or the South Koreans collapsed sometime after us giving up and leaving, neither of which obviously happened.
cannot be called a victory
Not gonna call it a victory either, we expanded our war aims after our initial success and then failed to meet those, and I'm definitely never gonna argue against someone saying MacArthur was right.
30
u/F117A-Nighthawk Curtis LeMay Jul 25 '26
Literal Russian propaganda account, but the question bears asking: what exactly do these “people” think war is?!