Stressful

Hello, and welcome to the wacky cavalcade of fun we call The Military Happy Fun-Time Hour!

You don't really need to read the story, but for the sake of transparency... here it is. Relevant text, in this case just to showcase my favorite quote of the day, is included below. The rest of the article says about what you'd expect.

America's top military officer has said opening up a third front in the Middle East through a strike on Iran would be "extremely stressful" for US forces.

Really? No kidding? I mean, that goes against all conventional military logic! How can it be!

Okay, sarcasm done. For those of you not in the know, two-front wars are bad business. They're why Germany lost World War II (well, one of the reasons was that they were led by a crazed, spittle-emitting dictator, but the whole two-front thing sort of naturally follows from that). They're why we currently are having something of a soldier-retention problem. They're bad news for armies.

That's largely because the number two is even, and armies don't like even numbers. Now the number three, that's odd, which means that armies like them and will approach them and eat food pellets out of their hands. Check out the serial numbers on all soldier's dog tags: all odd. Or the designations of ships: odd. Or the number of towers blown up on September 11th: even. Need I say more?

Okay, sarcasm again. The willful addition of a third front is so militarily irresponsible as to beggar description. Of course a third front in the Middle East will be "stressful." Hell, a second front in the Middle East was pretty stressful. And what exactly does "stressful" mean, anyway? I'm willing to bet they're not talking about the fact that there would be a certain amount of stress involved for the logistics personnel who have to ship all the troops to Iran. I'm pretty sure they mean the kind of stress which causes armies to lose wars.

What a marvel of understatement. This is not an argument against going to war with Iran. It's an argument against going to war with three different locations at once. It's an argument that is about as old as warfare. It's not even an argument, really, in the same way that saying, "Diving into molten lava will burn you," isn't really an argument against diving into molten lava. It's a fact. Three fronts: bad. Molten lava: bad. If you can't see that, then you have no business conducting a war.

Incidentally, I know that technically, one could argue that Germany was actually fighting a three-front war, what with Italy. In any case, Hitler actively chose two fronts, which was just poor strategy any way you slice it.