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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don't want to speak for Krasner but I will say that many critics of the 2003 Iraq War (myself included) don't say we "should have left Hussein alone".
I think we should have maintained the status quo of 2002, which I think was a good one, that had Hussein pinned down but allowed him to repress the worst of the islamic hordes within his borders.
Before 2003, the Christian community in Iraq was basically alive and well (by ME standards), and the status of women in society was far above the status of women in the rest of the ME. And Iraq was a huge counterweight to Iran. While at the same time our control of the Iraqi skies put definite limits on any Iraqi expansionist plans. You can't really say "best of all possible worlds" because everything in the ME sucks, but the best we could hope for.
Now... well, I don't have time... but to sum it up: FIASCO++
I may be over-simplifying but I think the answer to why we are not winning wars is:
To win a war you need to be RUTHLESS.
I offer up the bombing of Germany and Japan in WW2. We won that war against two very formidable enemies who, like us, were RUTHLESS. But we had bigger guns and we won.
We now fight wars according the PC requirements of the New York Times and the like. As a result, wars are no longer WON, they are ABANDONED. I offer up Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan as examples.
What wars? There hasn’t been a “war” since WWII. There have been numerous armed conflicts labeled “police action” or some such - and which have been carried out as such - but no wars (a la “kill the enemy and destroy his wealth until survivors surrender”). We’re not winning wars because there aren’t any.
“Why we aren’t winning wars”
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Just possibly we aren’t winning wars because we aren’t fighting wars. We are instead playing politically correct games with rules of engagement designed to not hurt anyone besides our own troops.
Answer ......phony ROE.
We aren’t fighting any wars, so it’s not surprising we aren’t winning any wars.
What we are doing is getting involved in local, tribal and centuries old conflicts/feuds. We’re taking sides when there is no side to take, they are all against (the West in general and the USA in particular) in the end.
They should not be here and we should not be there.
Bringing democracy and freedom my @ass. Nation building my @ass. All this has been simply stupid. Sorry, there is nothing else that it can be called.
There has been no broadbased and sustained national resolve supporting any involvement since WWII.
To compound that, politicians posture based on perceptions of how a war is progressing, they are for it before they are against it. Extended logic there indicates most would have quit WWII by 1943 because we were not winning it on any front.
The public is mis-led by the MSM with concentration of graphics of casualties and civilian/colateral damage rather than reporting that along with succeses in a balanced light.
The general public is grossly uninformed about military capabilities and weapons capabilities/effects mostly by distortions championed by the entertainment industry. Only 1% of the US population is actively involved in the military now. During WWII the number was something like 25%.
We have been conditioned for three generations now that the US is immoral when fighing any enemy regardless of the merits of the fight. Small opposition groups like CAIR are given disproportionate influence in arguing merits of a war.
We now define winning a war much differently than we used to. We now look at consequences and don’t call a war over until they’re known, we used to just look at the treaty. By the modern view we lost WWI because the mess we left behind gave us WWII. Heck given the way WWII put the pieces in place for the Cold War, Korea, and Viet Nam by the modern view we lost that one too.
The purpose and function of the military is to kill people and break things. We can do that. Anything much beyond that is asking too much of our government, be it 90 years ago or 90 years from now.