Utari's Puppies (Formerly Off-Topic Thread)

[Diana_Kim]

To all Caldari sympathizers - a musing

This line of thinking is very limited and myopic, Diana. Imagine you are a group that doesn’t have a ‘main attack’ planned. You’re a small group, a few thousand at best. You don’t have the wherewithal to challenge any significant military force directly. There is no way you can take and hold a strategic objective, no way you can prosecute a conventional war without being utterly annhilated, and quickly. So you take to asymmetric warfare. There are ways to prosecute an asymmetric war without ve…

@Arrendis

This line of thinking is very limited and myopic, Diana. Imagine you are a group that doesn’t have a ‘main attack’ planned. You’re a small group, a few thousand at best. You don’t have the wherewithal to challenge any significant military force directly. There is no way you can take and hold a strategic objective, no way you can prosecute a conventional war without being utterly annhilated, and quickly. So you take to asymmetric warfare.

There are ways to prosecute an asymmetric war without verging into terrorism:

And that line of thinking is just ignorant and annoying. First of all, asymmetrical warfare is a completely different topic from terrorism. The goal of assymetric warfare is to inflict highest damage with lowest resources. You attack targets with maximal value but minimal defense. You disrupt communication lines, logistics, take targets of opportunity to weaken your enemy. You’d know that if you’ve graduated SWA. But nooo…

And terror? Just going again some civvies, blowing up something completely unimportant like shopping malls, theaters and other useless for military advancement stuff.

There is a saying that terrorism is poor man’s war. But even with being poor you can remain professional and do significant damage to the enemy instead of just causing annoyance.

Consider one of our infamous figures in here. “Im gonna kill a million of minmatar slaves to hurt minmatars!” Yes, he did kill, they started crying, wriggling like worms, yelling at him, making names. But did he hurt TLF? ■■■■ no. He hurt only himself, because it was HIS ships and HIS slaves. This is another example - now of religious terrorism. The guy just wasted money to kill people without even minimal advancement. Killing just one TLF rifter might not cause such emotional impact, but it would deal way more significant blow against TLF than him killing even ten millions of his slaves.

@Arrendis

restrict your target list to valid military targets, make your actions, and affiliations known at the initiation of hostilities, and (and this is important and required) make a legitimate effort to remove civilians and non-combatants from danger, and minimize the collateral damage inflicted upon them.

Ancestors choke, are you ■■■■■■■ serious? Make your actions known? Make effort to “remove civilians?” Are you kidding me? Are you what, some sort of gallentean, who makes such “rules” just to violate them? “Required”? Required by WHOM exactly? You can relocate your own civilians from under attack if you know the enemy will strike in there. But if you’re planning an attack against enemy? Well, if you will come to them to “make a legitimate effort to remove civilians”, I’ll just laugh my pants off and wave goodbye to your assembled strike force.

@Arrendis

The classic example is an armed party boards a civilian transport. Asking everyone to remain calm, they tell the passengers they are member of an insurgent milita, giving the name of the militia. They then explain that there are members of the armed forces of the oppressor nation they are at war with on the transport, and ask those members to identify themselves and surrender to ensure no legitimate civilians are harmed. These steps are required in order to engage in legitimate, ‘legal’, asymmetric warfare that does not involve war crimes.

Failure to take these minimal actions—identifying the attacking party by means of announcement, uniform, or other livery (like your ident transponder that says you’re part of CalMil), and making an effort to avoid civilian loss of life—is considered indicative of a desire to sow fear among the civilian populace, and the attack is considered terrorism, and a war crime.

Well, now THAT was myoptic. Sweet Maker, that sounds like you’re some sort of cop or security officer. Why would you need to board that transport in the first place? I’ll give you counter-example - but with exact reason.

Imagine you have a FDU command center on a planet, and they settled in a bunker deep below the surface, so you can’t glass these rats out from the orbit. What can you do - is to send the assault team. But storming high defended bunker would bring too many casualties, and you decide to test them with faint attacks. Meanwhile, you’ve got intel that they’re running low on ammunition and sending in a whole iteron of goodies to support FDU in there. Would you board that?

Honesly, I wouldn’t. I don’t need cheap and low quality federal ammunition, it’s just terrible and can’t be compared with first grade Caldari products. Besides, that civilian transport can be stuffed with armed FDU soldiers who will cause heavy casaulties to your boarding squad. I wouldn’t board that. I’d just stuff it with red hot missiles until it pops.

Would it be legal? Dubious, might be legal, might be not, in majority - depending on the local authority, plus other factors, that aren’t really interesting to discuss in here.
Would it be terrorism? Definitely not - because it was done not to instill fear or other crap, but for direct military purpose, which was to prevent sieged enemy from getting supplies and reinforcements.

@Arrendis

And that’s true whether the attack is shooting soldiers on a transport, or detonating an AM charge that annihilates a Navy space station. The scale of the attack has nothing to do with the legitimacy of the action.

Way to bamboozle and derail the conversation. What do you want to discuss exactly, choose precisely, the legitimacy of action, or whether the action was terrorism or not? Or you just want to rant at everything at once?