The Lopsided War

Once upon a time there was a war, and a long and terrible one it was.

New tactics and technologies were show cased for the first time and the true face of wars to come were etched into every one of its battlefields.

Wanna guess which war this was? Civil war? World War 1 or 2? Spanish civil war?

Oh shut up, I'll tell you: Vietnam

Yup, from the first use of Helicopters for attack and aerial insertion purposes to Suicide bombers and the latest form of ideological warfare and fully realized assault rifles, Vietnam was a technological and tactical showcase for the new kind of war that will plague superpowers until some bright spark comes up with the new kind of war to replace the one being fought today.

Lopsided Wars seems the most accurate and important way to label conflicts like that currently going on in Afghanistan and Iraq, as they are marked by a distinct imbalance between the two sides, the weaker side having of course the superior technology and material while of course lacking the freedom of action and movement that makes the technologically and materially inferior side strong.

The reason of course that the more technologically superior side is the weaker one is because of the very nature of such lopsided wars: It is not a war that is won through the means that the comparatively chivalric Total Wars of the World War 1 & 2, force of arms and manufacturing superiority, but rather it is war that consists of primarily political and ideological battles.

And by ideological battle I am not talking about mere propaganda, which again is a lost cause for the technologically superior force unless the propaganda is truly a reflection of the political and social reality the man on the street experiences because the inferior force can do anything, any massacre or atrocity, and it will be forever unharmed as it will always be visibly a reaction to the superior force's ideological and political weaknesses.

No, the ideological war is one that turns on the actions of the superior force, the reasons for the war must be truly righteous and just, not greedy and bloated with self importance, and the manner in which the soldiers of the superior force conducts the war itself must be filled with compassion, a correctness in deed and empathy while giving no quarter to actions borne out of anger, vengeance, frustration and fear.

And only if the superior force realizes that the war must at all times be pursued with only one single aim in mind; to stop the inferior force from disrupting their efforts to pursue the righteous and just cause that precipitates the war in the first place, can it be won by them, whether the cause is the dethroning of a tyrant so that a just and uncorrupted government may replace them as they say now was the goal with Iraq and Afghanistan, or whether it be to stop the cycle of civil war or genocidal retaliation as might one day be necessary in some part of Africa, the Political War must the truest and only focus of the superior force's military might, civilian supply protection, policing and defanging of the inferior force by either removing their supply of arms or by removing their source of local political power and sympathizers are the only tactics that matter.

All this is easy enough to say of course, but this is still something that world powers have yet to learn or take into account as they still insist on training and preparing for another Total War, and still measure success by enemies killed rather than people saved.
And what kind of war can be made at all between two nuclear countries? One that moves beyond force of arms again and to a war of perfection where the side who makes the first mistake defeats themselves (as happened in the Soviet Union).

Even America and Britain's stop gap attempts at draconian measures of torture and terror to keep the conquered subjects in check is insufficient for winning the Lopsided Wars as all that can be won are the battles and never the war.

Look around you America and Britain, where are the empires who's methods you emulate? They have crumbled, they have lost and they have been defeated, colony by colony by colony.

Because the war you fight is one where you cannot defeat your enemy, they can merely be dissipated and forced to self destruct due nothing less than the Just intention and Correctness of your actions.