Posted on 07/28/2010 6:33:15 AM PDT by shortstop
The United States hasn’t truly fought since the ninth of August in 1945.
As the radioactive dust settled over Nagasaki, and peace with Japan was secured, we gave up war.
We have not fought one since.
Rather, we have engaged in a half century of half measures, in which we have deployed our military repeatedly but never actually used it once.
That is not meant to disrespect the courage and accomplishment of two generations of American servicemen, but rather to acknowledge the failed leadership which has directed them. Since the police action in Korea, we have been led by successive waves of presidents, secretaries and generals who have assured us that there is a “new” way to wage war, and that new realities demand new strategies.
Seldom has a more false or dangerous philosophy been forced upon a nation and its people.
Because there is nothing new about war.
In fact, war is one of the oldest and must unchanging aspects of human history. It is what it is and what it has always been, and any nation that ignores that fact will suffer and fail.
As America has failed on the field of battle since they signed the papers on the deck of the Missouri.
We died for the status quo in Korea, we lost a decade in Vietnam to see it fall to the communists, we went to Iraq to leave a dictator in power and to return a dozen years later to fight a stalemate with tribal savages, and now our nation’s longest conflict is in an Afghan hellhole where we have lost our sons and the battlefield initiative.
We have tactical ability, but strategic stupidity.
We send Americans to fight in a decidedly un-American way, with one arm tied behind their back, hamstrung by pacifist notions and without a strategic objective.
We build nations and win hearts and minds and, truth be told, we have never done either or come anywhere near close. We have been milked of our money and robbed of our blood and hated all the more for it.
We are the world’s lone remaining superpower and yet we were held off by any number of Iraqi neighborhood militias and every Afghan with a beard and a rifle.
Because we are not at war.
Because American leaders lack the stones to go to war. They have the arrogance to start one, but not the grit to fight one.
So we only went so far in Korea, and we surrendered everything we won in Vietnam, and we stopped at Baghdad’s front door, and we sent our troops to cultural-awareness class, and now we restrain them with rules of engagement that have killed hundreds of our troops.
Let me repeat that: There are hundreds of Americans who have perished in Afghanistan and Iraq who are dead because ridiculous, spineless, treasonous rules of engagement left them unprotected.
Even today, in Afghanistan, considerations for protecting civilian lives and currying the favor of locals are given higher priority than considerations for protecting American troops.
If American troops come under attack from a building or village, they may only return fire if they are reasonably certain there are no civilians in that building or village. If they fire, and civilians get hurt, they get in trouble – they may even face prison.
What has this done? Taught our enemy to hide among civilians, and made our troops reluctant to fight back.
In war, if a building or a village fired on American troops, it would be destroyed by artillery fire or air support.
Could civilians get killed?
You bet.
Would Americans be protected?
You bet.
Would it be worthwhile?
Absolutely.
And in short order the civilians would turn against the bad guys, knowing that their presence brought danger. Instead of hiding and supporting the enemy, as Afghans do now, they would turn against them.
Why?
Because they would fear us more than they fear them.
That is war. When Sherman marched to the sea, when the allies bombed Dresden, when we lit up Hiroshima, there were civilian casualties.
And that was the point.
Wars are never between militaries, they are always between societies. And the society that tolerates or supports our enemy is our enemy.
Wars are not won through good deeds, they are won through death and destruction. Peace lies on the far side of victory, and there is no peace until one side claims victory. And our side cannot claim victory because our side will not fight.
Instead, we pretend that by turning our troops into babysitters and welfare agents that we can “win the hearts and minds” of “the people.”
That has been America’s wartime strategy and tactic since Korea, and it has failed in every instance.
Because it is not war.
It is weakness.
And the weak side does not win war, the strong side does.
War is a hellacious, terrible thing. Great efforts should be made to avoid it.
And it should only be commenced if it is going to be concluded. It is a fish-or-cut-bait enterprise, and the nation that will not fight will not win.
Worse, it will merely shed the blood of both itself and its opponent. It produces destruction but not resolution, all of the evil, but none of the good.
And that is how America has fought for the last half century.
It is a shame, a sad demonstration of the foolish belief that history can be ignored. And as the president and his Pentagon are now escalating the Vietnam of this generation, we can only expect the outcome of the Vietnam of the last generation.
We will fight and bleed and lose.
Because we will not truly fight.
It’s like the T-shirt says: Go big or go home.
Unfortunately, it is likely we will do neither, and likely our nation will suffer as a consequence.
The United States hasn’t truly fought since the ninth of August in 1945.
Instead of fighting to win and that means killing the enemy in large numbers (not politically but strategically correct) the US and other countries (like Israel) have been waging not war but “conflict management”. Due to this concept, the good guys draw a stalemate at best...
As long as we allow Congress to run these wars and not the military, things will always be this way.
Which in the long run results in inexorable defeat.
Bump for later.
“We are also fighting liberals who don’t want us to kill the enemy and break things.”
I was briefly exposed to the NBC nightly lies last evening, where they were trying to portray Gen. Mattis as some sort of bloodthirsty killer for his 2005 comments about enjoying killing the Taliban. As though his demeanor was some sort of bad thing.
Well, the next thing I know I’m yelling at the TV, which usually happens when the network spin comes on. What is it that liberals don’t get about the military and war? I WANT a general who loves killing pukes like the Taliban. I WANT that killer personality in charge of my armed forces. I want him on a tight leash in peacetime, but in time of war, I want him to lay waste to my enemies and leave them, as General Phil Sheridan said “nothing but their eyes to lament the war.”
That’s what war is. It is a nasty brutal business. I want the guy who enjoys his job to go do it with gusto. Once upon a time we had guys like Sherman, Sheridan, Patton and LeMay, who knew what war was and how to win it. Now the left will do all it can to emasculate them.
We should have then pulled out.
WHAT in the WORLD constitutes “victory” in this extra-constitutional escapade started by one globalist President and pursued by a second????
Keeping Americans in Afghanistan, fighting and dying and expending American dollars until WHAT??? The Afghans become 21st Century democrats????? NEVER HAPPEN. Not unless they are FORCED to abandon Islam and good luck THERE.
Maybe Genghis Khan could accomplish that with HIS tactics, but we can't with ours.
The BEST tactic for the U.S. to follow in dealing with Islamic fanatic states which aid, abet and harbor Islamic terrorist is to go in with MASSIVE military power, fight the kind of total destructive Bliztkreig needed to destroy the culpable government and that nation's entire infrastructure, then PULL OUT. Let the SAUDIS pick up the tab for repairing the mess. Message delivered!!
Do this often enough and thoroughly enough and these lunatics will learn that the cost of harassing us is simply unbearable - and that lesson will be delivered with MINIMAL loss of AMERICAN lives and loss of American dollars.
Trying to OCCUPY one of these Islamic Hellholes and reform the natives is a waste of American lives and dollars and doomed to failure, while tying our military up and preventing their more effective employment in other more pressing theaters - like the Mexican Border, or - perhaps Iran or even Korea.
Thats what USSR did for many years there.. including using air explosive ordnance to “clear” villages, exterminating kids if the felt like it etc. For practical purposes they had same means but in addition to that complete disregard of casualties (their own as well as civilian). I guess they could have started nuking the place down, that is the only thing they did not do.
“Of course, in those days, we didn’t have Washington-based liberals laying down “rules of engagement.”
And THAT is the whole point of my last post. Americans today have not the got the stomach for a protacted conflict, nor the will to employ the kind of brutal tactics needed to succeed in dealing with fanatics.
The only way is the Blitzkreig model.
We use our superior military technology to inflict massive, unbearable losses, destroy their government and infrastructure, then pull out before our guys can suffer the kind of protracted losses the public won’t sustain and which are bound not to succeed in converting these animals into modern day republican type citizens.
“There are only a couple of tribes that support the Taliban. Wiping them out would eliminate most of the Taliban’s supporters and make a good example for the rest of the tribes. But, if done right, this would probably involve wiping out those entire tribes, man, woman, and child. You want to ask our troops to do that?
Neither do I.”
This may come as a shock, but yes, I DO want us to do that. Because it needs to be done. You can live in a world where everyone despises you for your weakness and walks all over you, or despises you but $h!+s their pants out of fear of your retaliation. I’ll take #2 any day, and you don’t get there without killing people. Period.
And I thought I was bloodthirsty...
Soldiers must live with themselves long after the war is over. And we must eventually bring them home. War sucks enough as it is; I don’t want to compound with a bunch of “Section 8” casualties. That is why, if they were competent, I’d use Afghanis. They wouldn’t have much problem with this... and I wouldn’t care.
I think the Soviet efforts were haphazard and slipshod. Historically, Russian military strengths excel in the areas of endurance and overwhelming brute force at a given location - ill suited to suppression of generalized and irregular resistance. As I posted earlier, Genghis Khan was able to make the place a bed of carrion and contented ravens by means of bows, arrows and ponies. Afganistan is not unbeatable. No nation or people is.
The US and its predecessor colonies have a lengthy and effective history of exterminating tribes. We have the knowledge and the material ability to do so again. We lack the will. Lacking the will we have rejected victory and embraced defeat. Having embraced defeat we should cut our losses and leave. Our troops are few and precious. They are our people. Obama watches them die with the same cold satisfaction with which he delayed the implementation of BAIPA. He is what he is.
Strictly speaking, Afganistan is largely irrelevant except that we have been sucked into a war of attrition on a third world patch of rocks and dirt in the middle of nowhere. Our principal foreign enemies are the two rival leaders of the Islamic world - Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shi’ite Iran. These are the two powers we - or someone - must eventually dispatch. Islam declared war on the entire world centuries ago. This war will continue until Islam’s ultimate triumph or its final extinction. Islam could be tolerated in the days of jezzails and scimitars. In the days of nuclear and biological weapons, the ability to tolerate this last relic of the Dark Ages is ended, or else we are.
Man, woman and child. Theirs or ours.
Well said.
IMO, before that. Truman and the UN in Korea.
Total agreement with your post #26.
BTTT
I think we are both “bloodthirsty” the way Ulysses S. Grant was. Grant saw the only means of ending the Civil War was to crush the Army of Northern Virginia, and not dick around with the job the way his predecessors with the Army of the Potomac had. His Overland Campaign of 1864 was enormously costly to both sides, but it was better than the interminable slow bleeding that the war had already inflicted. And it resulted in victory.
Another example of the historical arguments brought up by namby-pamby liberals is over the use of atomic weapons against the Japanese. They claim the Japanese were ready to surrender and we just dropped the bombs because we were racists and wanted to intimidate Stalin. What the liberals don’t take into account, and was brilliantly argued by Richard Frank in his book “Downfall,” is that the bombs saved lives. JAPANESE lives. Because the Japanese were NOT ready to surrender, and could have dragged the war through the winter of 1945-1946. Our blockade and strategic bombing campaigns were so successful that had the war dragged on even another 90 days, MILLIONS of Japanese civilians would have died from famine and disease.
I don’t like war. I don’t want war. I did not believe we should have gone to war in Iraq; that was W’s way of taking care of daddy’s unfinished business and not a true military mission.
But if provoked to war, you go the most destructive brutal route you can right out of the starting gate because you will need to resort to shocking brutality sooner or later if you want to win. Might as well get it over with immediately and not prolong everyone’s agony. In the long run, the quick brutal solution is actually the most humane to our troops and to the enemy.
Thanks.
And that is an AWESOME psalm. I never read that one before.
There is much wisdom in that prayer.
Russians have built massive land empire by being really good at subjugating native populations.
What has changed? I think by 1970s USSR army just as most modern armies has gotten soft to a degree. It could still slaughter anyone and anything with complete lack of remorse but it’s soldiers now commonly drawn from relatively comfortable environments like cities just could not handle fighting a war in a forbidding place like Afganistan.
Mongols were some of the most hardened (mentally and physically) people to ever exist. They have conquered most of Eurasia by being that. Able to ride dusk till dawn they moved far above the speed of the modern blitzkrieg, they required no supply train, no tent, no sleeping bag. They did not even need to cook their food. They were also killers from very young age able to inflict personal brand of terror that few people now have stomach for. The most hellish outpost manned now in Afganistant would be something where Mongol would feel completely comfortable and at home. Lack of water and food, constant killing, desease thats was their life from beginning to the end. There was no home to go to, “after the war” or troop rotations.
Don't ask, just use really big bombs, from remote control bombers, or use tactical long range missiles.
I don’t disagree.
I often wonder about the softening effects you mention. Perhaps civilizations by definition are too soft to survive, without periodic collapse and rebuilding.
I agree on the relative softness of the 1970s Soviet army, compared to their fathers. However, “Viktor Suvorov”, a Soviet defector wrote some interesting books in the latter days of the Cold War. I cannot remember if it was in “Inside the Aquarium” or “Inside the Soviet Army”, but he addressed the issue of urbanized softness. He claimed the veneer of civilization only lasted a few weeks when one was put into bare bones survival mode. He described the re-emergence of feral behavior, logic and perceptions in the course of a survival and evasion exercise.
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