April 1970: Trying to kill a sniper

Remember, each side killed one person.

One side can only afford to dispatch one soldier, with a non-sniper rifle, on a sniper patrol, and the pessimism shows in that he did the spray and pray technique every day and went home, knowing that his side couldn't bother even providing a proper sniper rifle. "They pretend to supply us, we pretend to fight for them". Its just bad luck that eventually a spray -n- pray weapons policy randomly hit some poor guy on our side resulting in massive retaliation.

The glass half empty way to look at $100K of small arms ammo to kill one guy is it cost $100K and that's not scalable if there's more than one guy. The other way to look at it, is this only happened once, which tells you all you really need to know about the opfor's opinion of this tactic, and furthermore we didn't appear to mind spending $100K on one opfor. That's why this kind of suicide kamikaze tactic was not super popular.

Now with backpack nukes, or maybe IEDs, maybe the scales tilt. But if all you have is an AK47 and a small amount of ammo per day, this isn't going to happen too much.

How do you win against an opponent who demonstrably doesn't care how much it costs to get you? Apparently, the only working strategy is you wait for him to leave. Which seems to be pretty much how it turned out.

As a side meta comment, times have changed on our side too. Back then the Army spent $100K on small arms ammo and they must have fired a hundred thousand rounds up at that hill, and somehow hit the opfor although they also hit roughly 99999 other things, hopefully not civilians. Now a days you get the opfor on the IR drone scope and drop a single hellfire missile costing $100K on him from the air. Its the same cost but much less visually impressive and much lower civilian casualties or general destruction.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wasp_(novel)

Amazingly, it was written in 1957. But when you read it, you'll see just how much more relevant it became since then.

Just to give a taste of it:

"Next, Mowry went to the crowded main post office, took half a dozen small but heavy parcels from his case, addressed them and mailed them. Each held an airtight can containing a cheap clock-movement and a piece of paper, nothing else. The clock-movement emitted a sinister tick – just loud enough to be heard if a suspicious-minded person listened closely. The paper bore a message short and to the point. This package could have killed you. Two different packages brought together at the right time and place could kill a hundred thousand. End this war before we end you! Dirac Angestun Gesept. Paper threats, that was all – but they were effective enough to eat still further into the enemy’s war effort. They’d alarm the recipients and give their forces something more to worry about. Doubtless the military would provide a personal bodyguard for every big wheel on Jaimec; that alone would pin down a regiment. Mail would be examined, and all suspicious parcels would be taken apart in a blast-proof room. There’d be a city-wide search with radiation-detectors for the component parts of a fission bomb. Civil defence would be alerted in readiness to cope with a mammoth explosion that might or might not take place. Anyone on the streets who walked with a secretive air and wore a slightly mad expression would be arrested and hauled in for questioning."

https://www.google.com/amp/www.independent.co.uk/news/world/...

Documenting this stuff is important. The photographer didn't decide to have a war, he's just there documenting it. What you take away from the images is your own interpretation, with more concrete data about what went on than you'd get from the accounts of others.

This sort of thing makes for good art as well, because it's a pretty nice looking light show -- juxtaposed with the caveat that it's all for state-sponsored murder. War is one of humanity's darkest moments, but these photos show that there can be beauty even in life-or-death situations.

I think your comment is distorting reality on several levels.

First of all, you take the fact that one side had a journalist and jump to a conclusion that the war was "fun" for them. How does "taking photos" entail "just for the kicks", exactly?

But the second distortion, which does not pop out that much, but is much more serious, is to measure different side's moral stance in a war by their suffering. You, implicitly, say that the side that suffers the most is by default on the moral high ground.

Is it your honest opinion on ethics of war? That suffering is the measure of morality?

I'm asking it because this kind of logic entails several very curious conclusions. For example, the moment one side gains the upper hand and the other loses it, they immediately switch places, bad guys become good and vice versa. Also, the weaker side can start conflicts and break armistices and will remain a "good guy" as long as it ensures that it has higher casualties, especially civilian. And, of course, any technology that would make my soldiers or civilians safer, and, therefore, leads to less suffering on my side, makes me less moral - and, therefore, is immoral on it's own.

It's most certainly life-or-death for both sides, even when resources are asymmetric.

When young men and women are forced to war against their will, they will find small ways to keep their own sanity and humanity -- they rest of us cannot possibly hope to relate.

Who is the bad guy here? Well, everyone I know who has been anywhere near a war came away worse. I don't think war turns you into a good person, whether you're firing automatic weapons at sleeping men, blasting a hilltop trying to kill someone's son, or sleeping with a machete in a town where the rule of law has collapsed.

It looks like they have a reddish hue.