Comment on The Belmont Club "Dragging through history"

Momentum matters.

As I said on "The Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes" thread change happens at an interface and it is often stimulated by morally questionable activity. Without foolish youths attempting Saturday night drag racing there would be no trained engineers inspecting captured technology.

This exercise happened immediately before the battles of Kohima and Imphal that turned back the Japanese invasion of India. In strategic importance those engagements could be compared to the German defeat at El Alamein in 1942. Information gained in these tests could have prevented a Japanese breakthrough.

The Burma theater is neglected by most Americans. The experience gained in jungle fighting in WW-II, and not only in the Island Hopping campaigns, along with post war British insurgency suppressions, contributed to the allied institutional knowledge base. To many Americans now believe that we blundered into Vietnam with no understanding of how to fight in a tropical environment. That ignores all this accumulated professional experience. It even disparages America's own experience in the Philippines. Sometimes the enemy convinces you that you do not know what you know.