Posted on 01/15/2015 7:18:15 AM PST by DJ Taylor
The United States has the most potent military in terms of firepower and operational capacity in history. Our military overthrew Saddam Hussein and crushed the Taliban in a matter of weeks. Our forces can direct a rocket from Nevada through a window in Kandahar, Afghanistan, and nimbly set up nearly 20 Ebola treatment centers in Liberia.
Yet this same military, as writer James Fallows recently pointed out in the Atlantic, has not won its wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya or anywhere else in the last 20 years — if winning means creating a stable, capable and ideally democratic governing structure that is able and willing to police its own territory. After the United States poured billions of dollars into the Iraqi army, it fell apart in the face of a few thousand initially lightly armed Islamic State fighters.
(Excerpt) Read more at theintell.com ...
Did Kasner just say we should have left Saddam Hussein alone?
Obsms got rid of all the generals who wanted to win. Now the Finest Military in the World is forbidden to attack the enemy until the enemy attacks first. Obama should be arrested for war crimes against our soldiers.
War is a continuation of politics by other means,
and right now our politics SUCK.
When kids take up rockets and bombs to kill our soldiers, when people strap bombs to themselves to kill us—we have lost. We will never defeat such a movitvated foe—unless we want to wade in blood or crush whole cities with atomic weapons like we did the Japanese. We do not have the will to go all Nazi on our enemies. Best we should pull out and let things evolve the way they will.
Interesting points.
After World War II, we occupied Japan and transformed their society into a society that would be part of the civilized world, with a capitalist economy, parliamentary system of government, and other infrastructure of modern civilization. We de-Nazified West Germany and transformed West Germany into an ally with a parliamentary system. But we were unable or unwilling to do the same in Iraq or Afghanistan after the overthrow and military defeats of their regimes.
We are trying to “Out-Tough” enemies who have hard scrabble lives in some of the most inhospitable places on earth. Maybe we need smarter leaders.
Winning would be destruction enough to extract a surrender/submission to end hostilities.
Until we can bomb cities back to the stone age, we will never “win” another war.
Winning in Afghanistan? North Warizistan needed to be levelek to a point where no Taliban could hide there. ISIS? Wherever they are, level the town.
Yes there is collateral damage and it is a shame that innocents are killed. However if you are not willing to go Dresden on them, you can not win in the long run.
The definition of winning, with regards to war is wrong. It’s “comprehensive”. Our government cannot do anything that is “comprehensive”.
The definition established as a win, with regards to war, needs to remain strictly militarily. When the enemy’s forces have surrendered or are no longer capable of effective and organized resistance, the ware should be won.
By this measure still, I’m not sure we can call either of the wars a “win”. But I will say, we defeated Iraq cleanly. Then a new war started with a different foe when the terrorist came in with IEDs.
If we want to do government building like in WWII, that should be a separate operation from the Military Goal. And that too should be clearly defined and include security forces. This means setting up bases like in Europe and Japan to sustain those security forces. Call it occupy if you want. I don’t care.
Why? Lack of political will to tell everyone who objects to true shock and awe to f**k off, and use it.
As much as I respect our soldiers, I would NOT recommend anyone to join up now.
Political correctness is deadly, and under the ideological and cynical Obama (and possibly next, Clinton) US soldiers will continue to be put in “no win” situations.
Everything since was a glorified "police action"...
You win wars by destroying the enemy's ability to fight and that means civilians suffer right along with the enemy forces. Now we try to win hearts and minds by being nice and going out of our way to not hurt anyone.
Japan and Germany did not surrender because we were nice to them. They surrendered because they knew we were going to wipe them from the face of the earth if they didn't surrender and we had destroyed their ability to fight. Their countries were in ruins and their war machines were utterly destroyed.
We went to fight Afghanistan and Iraq and let outside forces resupply the enemy. If we had used WWII doctrine we would have utterly destroyed those that were supplying the arms to our enemies as well. This is why we lose now. We don't fight to win. We fight to try and get the enemy on our side and to get them to do things our way by being nice to civilians. It doesn't work. Didn't work in Korea or Viet Nam not gonna work with the muzzies either.
Won't work in the Muslim world.
That is not winning wars, it is conquest using the nice sounding term "nation-building".
Winning a war is defeating an enemy.
Nation building is where we have almost always failed.
We aren’t winning because we don’t believe in our own cause.
We are half-hearted; they are one-hearted in what they believe and want.
We can’t even show the Mo cartoons.
Hence, they win.
When did we crush the Taliban?
We do fine at winning battles and completing operational objectives; no one can touch our Army at the tactical or operational levels of warfare. The problem is the strategic level; since WWII we don’t let our military officers have any signicant input into how best to attain our national policy objectives— in other words, craft military strategy. Great generals of the past were great because of their grasp of the tactical, operational, and strategic levels of warfare and the ability to seamlessly execute them in a synchronized fashion within the decision cycle of their enemies. Now we jump into wars with no clearly defined success criteria, no end state objectives and no rationale on how the military action will destroy our enemies ability to attain their political objectives... in effect no strategy.
Because we are fighting not to win. We haven’t WON a war since WW2. All we’ve done is allowed our men and women die for the status quo. Wake me up when our politicians decide that WARS MUST BE WON.
We so not need to “crush whole cities”. We only need to remove the incentive for jihadis to die in battle. Right now they believe that:
“The fundamentals of Islam state that the only way to be assured of Paradise is to die as a shahid for Allah. Jihad against all unbelievers is the fundamental way of Islam. This is not just a few radicals, this is Islam. The highest goal of Islam is death, not life.
The Hadith are part of the Islamic scriptures. Listen to this passage from the Hadith:
The shahid has seven blessings from Allah.
He is forgiven from the moment his blood is first shed.
He will be shown his place in Paradise.
He will be spared the trial of the grave.
He will be secure on the day of the greatest terror, the day of judgment.
There will be placed on his head a crown of dignity, one ruby of which is better than this world and all that is in it.
He will be married to seventy-two virgins and he will be able to ravage them through all eternity.
He will be permitted to intercede for seventy of his relatives.”
http://www.fortressoffaith.org/blog/2014/11/05/the-seven-blessings-of-the-shahid-part-3/
Remove the guarantee of those blessings and the supply of potential martyrs will dry up.
You’re right. The US Military can take down any government in the world. What the civilian leadership does not understand is that land is held with boots and bayonets. Rumsfeld and Bush screwed up trying to do Iraq on the cheap... it required at least two more divisions, and the Army Chief of Staff was retired for telling them that. We were also unwilling to spend the two generations it would take to change their attitudes and build an educated populace.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.