VDH's Observation On Suicide Tactics

In Victor Davis Hanson's book, "Ripples of Battle", Hanson writes about how three battles in Western History have affected our modern day outlook on war and how we fight it. Below is VDH's theory on the use of suicide bomber tactics and the subsquent American military response to them, which I think it dead-on. It might've done a world of good for the muslim jihadists of this world to have studied the history of American warfare, for they might've saved the lives of tens of thousands of their fellow muslims. Alas, for all their sabre rattling and theatrical decapitations on video, one thing they'll never have is the technology to deliver a 500-lbs. bomb on top of someone's head from an F-16 going at Mach 2. Delightful as it is for them to bathe in their ability to inflict heartless cruelty, it will always pale in comparison to the mechanical wrath of the United States. Zarqawi obviously didn't get the memo...

In the battle of Okinawa, played out in May and June of 1945, the Japanese threw 200 suicide bombers at the American Navy per attack. Whereas the casualty ratio of U.S. Army/Marines on the ground to Japanese infantry was about 1 GI for 100 Japanese, the ratio for the U.S. Navy per Japanese suicide bomber was 5:2 (five sailor killed or wounded for every two suicide attacks by the Japanese). That the decision to drop the A-Bomb on Japan was hastened by the kamikaze tactics employed by the Japanese in the latter stages of the war is an understatement.


Victor Davis Hanson:

Much of the collapse of the kamikazes, then, had to do with the American counter-response. The terror of suicide brought out the greater terror of the Western way of war. Americans not merely devised immediate countermeasures to the kamikazes and suicide banzai charges-everything from picket destroyers to flame-shooting tanks-but also left the island with a changed mentality about the nature of war itself: from now on fanaticism of the human will would be repaid in kind with the fanaticism of industrial and technological power. Okinawa taught the world that the chief horror of war is not the random use of suicide bombers, but thhe response that they incur from Western powers whose self-imposed restraint upon their ingenuity for killing usually rests only with their own sense of moral reluctance--a brake thhat suicidal attack seems to strip away.