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A comment on Notes from a Sun Tzu Skeptic (2019). Parent comment

Re:Notes from a Sun Tzu Skeptic (2019) by mcv on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @06:44AM (#35523262)
> There are no universal laws that always hold true in all situations.

There are some. An army marches on its stomach. For war, you need three things: money, money and money. Except in a guerilla war maybe. Maybe you're right after all.

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Re:Notes from a Sun Tzu Skeptic (2019) by t43562 on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @07:09AM (#35523421)
Guerillas need money too. Weapons are not free and guerillas need to eat too.
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Re:Notes from a Sun Tzu Skeptic (2019) by michaelt on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @10:40AM (#35525833)
As long as you've got some bootstrap weapons, you can always steal more from whatever force it is you're fighting against. In WW2 the US proposed sending resistance fighters a million single-shot handguns [1], allowing them to kill occupation forces and take their weapons.

And while men with guns very often get shot, they never starve.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FP-45_Liberator

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Re:Notes from a Sun Tzu Skeptic (2019) by kjs3 on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @11:52AM (#35526906)
Getting shot is a cost, even if it isn't necessarily 'money'. Resistance fighters do go hungry. The resistance in the Warsaw ghetto had guns; they starved. On the Long March, Mao's men had guns, and they very much faced starvation. And ask the Confederates about the difficulty of feeding a rebel army. The idea that the answer to logistics issues is "moar guns" is comical and more than a little sad.
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Re:Notes from a Sun Tzu Skeptic (2019) by michaelt on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @02:01PM (#35528768)
> Getting shot is a cost, even if it isn't necessarily 'money'.

Maybe, but we're evaluating the quote "For war, you need three things: money, money and money" which is presumably about money.

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Re:Notes from a Sun Tzu Skeptic (2019) by t43562 on Wednesday April 12, 2023 @07:06AM (#35537753)
That puts you at an extreme disadvantage which could be solved with ... money. And of course in history guerillas often have had sources of supply from other countries who are in effect providing the money. All the proxy wars of the Cold War period were like this - the Chinese or Russians or North Koreans supplying guerillas in Africa against non-communist governments or the US or South Africa doing the same for guerillas against "communist" governments.

I'm from Zimbabwe - everything in Rhodesia was about money. Money needed by the government of the time to stop the guerillas and money needed by the guerillas to house them in neighboring countries, feed and arm them.

Now that Zimbabwe is in terrible economic trouble and has obviously rigged elections and much suppression of opposition voters and of course a military coup that everyone denies was a coup, there is no rebellion and there are no guerillas because they would have no support (no money, no safe harbour, no weapons). The Russians, Chinese, South Africans and DPRK have the situation they want and the US etc don't care about it either.

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Re:Notes from a Sun Tzu Skeptic (2019) by sofixa on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @09:13AM (#35524648)
> For war, you need three things: money, money and money. Except in a guerilla war maybe. Maybe you're right after all.

This seems to imply that money will win you wars, which is not the case. You don't need "money" to get foreign military aid, nor to manufacture small arms in your own factories, especially if you use slaves for that (like the Nazis did).

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Re:Notes from a Sun Tzu Skeptic (2019) by mcv on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @10:00AM (#35525257)
Money on its own won't win you wars, but you need money to even be able to fight. Sure, you may be able to replace some of the money with slave labour, levies/conscription, but you still need enormous amounts of food, materials, supplies and people, and a lot of that does require money, unless you've managed to completely eradicate money from your society.
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