Originally posted by Officer of Engineers
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"It just complicates the other guy's war plans to make him think it's not worth the effort."
What I have been saying. A two pronged strategy:
1) Do your best not to make the big guy want to attack you
2) Convince the big guy that even after all this, for some reason he still does, he might lose a few of his cities, a million or more of his people, before he destroys us.
That he will destroy us is a given. So if the big guy still attacks, our deterrence has not worked. We have already lost. He has been given a choice, and he has made his choice. Now we have to make ours, while we still can.
The deterrence lies in making him ask the first question -is it worth attacking and losing a few of my cities.
And we can make him ask that question only by
1) Being able to hit him
2) Continuing to be able to hit him even after a massive preemptive first strike
Once he has answered the question, and has decided to attack anyway, we have already lost. Slade's dissection of defeat vs destruction becomes an academic throw of dice then, dependent fully on what we think or believe the big guy would do. When and IF he would say enough.
Can we take the risk of finding out he will not stop before flattening us completely? Will we go down then without hitting back, while we still could?
That is a question we will have to leave for him to find out ...... that is the final half of the deterrence. The second question after the first.
If the Americans decide to intervene in any scenario, they will destroy the opposing force's nuclear threat to the CONUS before anything else ... before they will come to the rescue of her allies.
Deterrence is not warfighting and you have been putting up the warfighting scenario without understanding the implications. China is expecting to lose all her ICBMs without nuking any American city. Get it?
Your scenario dates back to the faceoff with the Soviets when the Chinese had 12 working nukes.
Things have changed.
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