The other big thing, as I note frequently, is that we're accustomed to "wars" against opponents with basically no ability to strike back, so we assume that we can always control the scope of the battle and the rate of escalation, which is rarely true in most wars.

April 07, 2026 - 03:34 UTC

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As a person who lives within shouting distance of the Port of Houston, one of the largest ports and oil refineries in the US, and not so far from a number of nations we regularly bully, I've been thinking about that.
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Fun to look up Houston on the old cold war planning maps (USA & USSR) 😬
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this is also, i think, part of where the “lethality” obsession comes from on the right. we’re used to deliberately waging limited wars, we also don’t exactly have a great record of winning those wars, so a simple argument goes that we can just “stop pulling punches” and we’d win
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this is also because the american experience of “losing” a war is watching a sad movie about it years later, not, you know, actually suffering consequences of a real defeat
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Oh yeah. Back as a cadet the party line was that if Linebacker II was allowed to continue with maximum force we would have "won" Vietnam somehow.
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