Shroom Man 777 wrote:Really depends. Contemporarily... suicide attacks are kinda not-that-old. They emerged in the 80s... and became a fad after. In the Soviet-Afghan war, the Mujahadeen didn't do suicide attacks that much, I think. And that was like the greatest jihad of all time. Ever. Against the greatest enemy ever. Soviet Russia. Only the Butlerian Jihad and Leto II's jihad would surpass that.
Yeah it's been creeping since then, though WW2 saw its good share of suicide units on all sides except really the US. The Afghans used lots of openly suicidal tactics in field combat against the Soviets. They did not engage in many insider attacks or blow yourself up in the Russians faces attacks because the Russians always kept to their own bases, they didnt even try offensive operations for several years of the war, and they made their Afghan government allies kill the family of anyone who did cross them. So the Russians kept up highs security, but this also meant they did a poor job training the locals to defend their own country, and never could suppress the Mujahadeen field units because they didn't deploy enough offensive troops to do it.
And in the other pre-80s conflicts, from Black September massacrating Munich to the Battle for Algiers to all those hostage takings of airplanes that inspired all sorts of Chuck Norris movies, suicide attacks didn't figure that much.
The problem is two things. 1) is the Chuck Noriris types became real, and got very good at storming aircraft, and in some countries like Egypt nobody cared if hostages died in the process. The terrorists got dead, period.
The Second problem is the whole damn theory of terrorism as was pushed in the 1960s was proven bunk by the 1980s. It might influence some kind of civil war that had an active ground war, but it made no effect on developed stable countries. Such countries would generally pass more draconian security laws rather then yield to terror pressure. The morons of the 1960s were operating on the assumption that this would cause a public blacklash that would give them victory. That's why they didn't want to just kill people always.
Once that idea was discredited as the stupid is clearly was, the only option is to dial up the terror-pressure into something much more overtly destructive. That has also basically failed completely as a strategy, but it's what led directly to Osama Bin laden's tactic. Bin laden was smart enough to realize that a hundred one man suicide bombings meant nothing, it will no more break moral then WW2 bombing. But a single shock enough event, or a couple of them, that might do something because people are capable of irrational panic. But this also meant each attack had to be much bigger then the last.
As we've seen, that also failed. The US just fucked with the middle east way harder in reply while its domestic situation continued unchecked. Ironically precisely because 9/11 worked so well it has IMMUNIZED FREEDOM against the terror-shock of an attack on that level. Which really only leaves nukes or schemes too complex to be likely to work.
And any sane conclusion by now would be that conventional terrorism is useless. THAT is where Islamic State comes into play. Sure they have traditional terrorists, and a bunch of bonus moron squads, but their international terrorists almost seem to only exist to basically be butthurt rage against the machine and to stir up supporters. The group focus is on being what it tries to call itself, a state, and dare all to stop them.
They've been so damn successful on the ground war because they've integrated the suicide tactics into remotely coherent regular ground units. The Tamil Tigers also managed that on some scale, and proved very hard to beat because of it too. In the case of ISIL though extra things like high quality drones to scout out anti vehicle defenses in real time are making them way more effective then they ever could have been even one decade ago. Combine arms works. Terrorism just doesn't.
Europe seems to do its best to fear everything to the point of paralysis even though its past terror problem was way worse and in some respects even more irrationally driven. Thing is it doesn't actually take terrorism to make large areas of Europe completely politically incapable of any useful action on anything, so it's almost irrelevant, making inaction a strategic non victory against the euromongers. Sadly we can expect continued random attacks like this for at least several more years, as at the present rate of progress ISIL will probably still have a damn field army in 2018 and Trump may not be able to speed that up much.
Once it ceases to exist as a field army it is hard to know how many of its personal will successfully disperse and become terror-insurgents again, and how many will be left alive try to return to Europe. Most of its people are locals though.
"This cult of special forces is as sensible as to form a Royal Corps of Tree Climbers and say that no soldier who does not wear its green hat with a bunch of oak leaves stuck in it should be expected to climb a tree"
— Field Marshal William Slim 1956
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- PeZook
