[AndyJackson]

Our Genius Generals spent twenty years and trillions of dollars losing to the Taliban, leaving billions in weapons behind, and the Taliban only had AK-47s and improvised IEDs, and no air assets at all. ...But I’m sure the Genius Generals of the Pentagon would do MUCH better against Russia, right next door to Russia.

The current antiseptic high tech American style of warfare overlooks a crucial thing. That stuff works against ships and aircraft and really expensive hardware, but to control what happens on the ground you have to hold ground and exclude others from using the ground. And that means boots on the ground willing to engage in the bloody nightmare of combat on the ground killing people.

Anyone who read EB Sledge's classic book "With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa" or y T. R. Fehrenbach's book on the Korean War "This Kind of War" would get a clue about the problem. You cannot defeat the guy trying to knife your pilot on the ground by taking off in a B52 and bombing your own base.

We blew Sadam out of his villas, but we created the Iraqi resistance. As Tom Schelling wrote in his classic "Arms and Influence" even unconditioanl surrender isn't really total surrend in the sense that you didn't fight the war to utterly exterminate a people and a culture. And so what you can get in war, even total war resulting in total surrender of the other side's military only gets you so much.

You never take the house. You just get another turn at the table.

[Jim Noble]

but to control what happens on the ground you have to hold ground and exclude others from using the ground. And that means boots on the ground willing to engage in the bloody nightmare of combat on the ground killing people.

Which means, inspiring and holding the hearts of men.

Can you imagine Milley or Austin doing THAT?