Well, actually, yes. Hand-to-hand combat with an enemy who can do to you what you can do to him is quite different from sitting in an armoured gun platform and raining death from high above on people whose faces you cannot properly see and who would have to be very lucky indeed to hurt you or shoot you down. I am told there are instances of Apache helicopters being brought down by small-arms fire, but I think this extremely rare. I do not think the crew of the Apache were in any grave danger (nothing like the danger in which those beneath them found themselves), nor do I think the US soldiers on the ground, in their Bradley armoured vehicles, were much menaced by the alleged insurgents in this video. Nor was I convinced by the helicopter crew's 'positive identification' of weapons. Did they want to shoot? Wouldn't you, with a 1.2 inch chain-gun at your command, and a city laid out below you, waiting to be shot up? I'm afraid there's still enough of the boy in me for me to say quite honestly that, in their situation, I would have longed to squeeze the trigger. Would anyone care seriously to deny this possibility, and the need for iron discipline to keep it under control? I cannot be persuaded that this form of warfare is chivalrous. I can see that it sometimes saves the lives of those who engage in it (though the Apache was originally developed for combat against numerically superior conventional Soviet forces in Europe, not for urban warfare) - but at what moral and political cost? In this case, the long-term cost to US prestige will be immense. And less civilised powers will be able to use this event as their excuse for similar acts in decades to come.
He thus explains how the US would lose at 4GW. (See his earlier post, A few notes on the American military.)
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