[fruitless]

A real war is way easier - you can beat them and go home. These low-intensity asymmetrical conflicts are way harder. That’s why the army focused on conventional readiness after vietnam and excelled at the set-piece battles against a state army in Iraq I and II, and made a mess of Afghanistan and the Iraqi occupation.

[Zhang Fei]

[A real war is way easier - you can beat them and go home. These low-intensity asymmetrical conflicts are way harder.]

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I wouldn’t call taking 400,000 dead in WWII and spending 2 years worth of annual output ($43T) in terms of direct costs easy. If you do the numbers the way some of the war critics do it, WWII would have cost the equivalent of $200T. Afghanistan and Iraq are easy. You just spend about 10% of the military budget for decades until the insurgents give up, which is what it takes.

The Colombians have been fighting an insurgency for 50 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colombian_conflict The last Indian campaigns ended in the early 20th century, after almost 400 years of off-and-on insurgent campaigns against European settlers and their descendants. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Indian_Wars There are quicker, low-tech, low-budget ways to resolve this. But that would involve punitive massacres along the lines of Lidice, where 5,000 Czechs were killed in reprisal for the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich. Czech partisan operations were never the same after that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Anthropoid

[heterosupremacist]

fruitless wrote:

***A real war is way easier - you can beat them and go home. These low-intensity asymmetrical conflicts are way harder. That’s why the army focused on conventional readiness after vietnam and excelled at the set-piece battles against a state army in Iraq I and II, and made a mess of Afghanistan and the Iraqi occupation.***

Excellent, and fruitful, analysis!