Airborne Laser Test Successful!

[RF]

I can't understand how it went from lasers to the philosophical understanding of the idea of victory.

Then please reread my last post.

Given the infancy of these weapons and their application, the whole concept of military and political objectives will need to be revisited, which by definition means how do you define victory?

How about for example, handicapping an industrial competitor by using your space lasers to give millions of people in that country skin cancers? All done secretly of course, and with climate change as your alibi.

Oops, I have gone off thread again, I mentioned climate change.... Its a totally fictional scenario in which lasers are used to inflict nuclear wounding - but it reflects that the whole concept of conflict changes with those weapons.

[Bgile]

I can't understand how it went from lasers to the philosophical understanding of the idea of victory.

I can. We keep bringing political agendas into unrelated topics. I regret contributing to it.

[RF]

But conflict is by definition political - at the strategic (and in this case, conceptual) level it is impossible to leave all forms of politics out.

If you don't agree - then how can you have a ''value free'' war? How can a war not be political? How can any conflict or any arrangement of civil society not be political to some degree?

This is a problem with all threads in that they throw up other issues which then obscures the original issue raised in the threads. Such is the complexity of life...... but this is going to happen and all we can do is accept it. Nothing exists in a vacuam.

[Karl Heidenreich]

War is the continuation of politics by other means.

-Clausewitz