I think that Warrior Madness wanted to say that the US didn't even use the full potential of their army. The war was completly useless and Ev- but that's another question.
Not so funny fact but quite interesting: the French army lost more people in Vietnam than the American army and nobody remember this war nowadays in France. Yea it happened a couple of years before and most of the casualties weren't metropolitan French or conscripts but still it is kinda interesting to see how 70K casualties and 300K injured soldiers traumatized a country as large than the US. It also showed why conscription is terrible and the tremendous impact of the medias when you fight abroad and your country isn't really endangered.
Most of the post colonial wars have been lost because at one point people in Western countries realized that when you have all the native civilians agaisnt you can't really win. You have either to bring huge amount of troops which is really costly and/or slaugther the population. Hopefully the Western public opinion has matured a lot after the two WW and torture, civilian executions or napalm bombings aren't really popular hence the withdrawal.
On January 15 2010 07:45 Boblion wrote: I think that Warrior Madness wanted to say that the US didn't even use the full potential of their army. The war was completly useless and Ev- but that's another question.
Not so funny fact but quite interesting: the French army lost more people in Vietnam than the American army and nobody remember this war nowadays in France. Yea it happened a couple of years before and most of the casualties weren't metropolitan French or conscripts but still it is kinda interesting to see how 70K casualties and 300K injured soldiers traumatized a country as large than the US. It also showed why conscription is terrible and the tremendous impact of the medias when you fight abroad and your country isn't really endangered.
Most of the post colonial wars have been lost because at one point people in Western countries realized that when you have all the native civilians agaisnt you can't really win. You have either to bring huge amount of troops which is really costly and/or slaugther the population. Hopefully the Western public opinion has matured a lot after the two WW and torture, civilian executions or napalm bombings aren't really popular hence the withdrawal.
Agree, you would have to be absolutely ruthless in order to cow the population. The way it's done now is to create a sense of shock and fear by dropping a ridiculous amount of bombs and such to frighten the population into submission. The problem comes when they recover though, as we are seeing in Iraq. Once they realize that their economic futures are becoming nonexistent, they start to fight back and it becomes a huge problem for the invading army. With the advent of the internet, it's becoming more and more difficult to act brutally without the knowledge of the home population.
But the American public is fickle, we've used torture in Guantanamo and it's public knowledge. Somehow, we have people on TV trying to say that what we did, like waterboarding, was not torture, although it clearly is by the Geneva Convention and by common standards of morality. By any standard, many people in the Bush administration should have went on trial and be in jail for the parts they played in this, but all of them are scot-free and they have actually earned millions of dollars instead, thanks to their corporate interests. We also see civilian executions all the time. However, we don't process it as real people dying, since the media only reports it as a statistic on a page. It's hard to humanize statistics.
On January 15 2010 05:06 ProdT wrote: You guys need to wake up, we are not leaving Iraq. Ever. There are permanent military bases installed there, this is no temporary thing, as long as theres oil/other ways of profit there. So of course more and more money will be needed to fund the "war".
I'm in the Air Force. If I'm correct... aren't the military forces staying in Iraq and a SHIT TON more are going to Afghanistan. If anything there will be more people in the desert. "Bring the military home" gig isn't happening anytime soon lol
On January 15 2010 01:53 ondik wrote: Nobel peace prize is in good hands.
QFT
I voted for Obama, but I haven't been paying too much attention to him, or his administration (I've been too busy to watch news and such) but all I hear is negative things about him, maybe its all just Fox news trying to rally the troops for the next mud slinging campaign, but I don't know anymore.
First off, I never stated anything about the justification of the Vietnam War. I was just responding directly to one of the posters who said that Vietnam was an unwinable war militarily.
On January 15 2010 06:39 Archerofaiur wrote: WarriorMadness is an appropriate name. You have the same soldier thinking process stuck in WW2 mentality as far too many others. Like how you define "won" as who killed the most other guy or who got this hill (only to forfiet it a couple hours later). Or how its "weak" to decide that the war is not the best option.
Yeah.... You're right. Just because one side loses a total of 200 troops and the other side loses 18,000.... It doesn't necessarily mean that one side is "winning". Umm, Okay. Also, since when did I "define" who "won" as the forces who suffer less causalities? (Not to be confused with who's winning). I think you glossed over the part where I wrote that the US won tactically, but lost strategically (Lost the war on propaganda, lost the psychological war, lost the political war).
The north focused their greatest efforts and largest available resources towards propoganda. Towards winning the people's hearts and minds by every means possible, even through gross lies. One such tactic was likening the American troops to the French in the 1946-1954 War. The North Vietnamese readily bought grossly inaccurate stories about atrocities the American troops were committing, with the French War still fresh in the public's minds. The entire population was enraptured by lies such as these and were willing to sacrifice untold amount of human lives in order for victory. Their propoganda was extremely sophisticated, had many goals and aimed at targets all over the world as well, not only in Vietnam.
North Vietnam was a like North Korea is today. They severed all outside contact with the world. So the leaders had absolute control over public opinion, what reached their populace's eyes, and ears, hearts and minds. The tet offensive was by all means a military victory, but somehow it degenerated into a moral defeat in Washington. And it's easy to see why. Whereas North Vietnam had absolute control over what would be heard, and NOT heard, the US and South Vietnam of course did not have such control. Every little piece of news, every little unfavourable detail, every death was plastered all over magazines, radio shows, networks, everywhere.
On January 15 2010 08:54 Warrior Madness wrote: The North Vietnamese readily bought grossly inaccurate stories about atrocities the American troops were committing, with the French War still fresh in the public's minds.
Do you have any idea how America would react if anyone, for any reason whatsoever, tried to "liberate" us? We would do the exact same thing as the Vietnamese. Wed fight them tooth and nail and when they destroyed our towns we would hide in the woods. Wed broadcast messages about fighting back and even though they killed more of us then we did them we would keep fighting until they left.
On January 15 2010 00:49 cz wrote: That's the problem with the system: the voters are too stupid to realize that sometimes you have to fold and you can't win every war. You take this voting group and put it in the 70s and the United States would still be in Vietnam.
The US lost the vietnam war because the American people were weak. The media, for the first time in history, exposed in unflinching detail, the horrors of war to the sheltered masses and this had a tremendous effect on the public psyche. That war itself was incredibly cost effective, the ratio of American troops lost in relation to the Viet Cong was something like 200:1. The Vietnamese people are still bitter about the war, not because of the war itself but because the US and its allies abandoned the cause. Right after they withdrew, over 1,000,000 Cambodians were slaughtered in genocide. And to this day they're still in a quagmire of poverty, and communism.
It's actually quite like the blackhawk down incident. The US had the entire navy at the steps of Somelia but as soon as a few dead soldiers are shown on tv, their dead bodies being paraded and desecrated, the following day they withdraw all of the forces. That's pretty much like saying, "We're the most powerful nation in the world, but all it takes for you to beat us is to kill a few of our soldiers." And the results were similar. The country continued to tear itself apart in civil war, the government to this day is unstable, and no country within 100 miles will even touch it, or put in any aid.
You hit the right string there. The problem with waging wars this days is that the public just can't handle it. They're all about "Hell yeah! Let's kick their asses!", then they realize that sometimes you get kicked back...
And because the death toll isn't as high during the current wars (yet) and because media operate differently now (easier access, more freedom etc.) they're not dealing with "Three hundred thousand people have died today in wherever" but instead "Tom Whatshisname, Steven Hasanametoo and Paul Getsmentionedaswell..." which makes it a lot more personal and unacceptable (not to mention the direct, hq pictures and videos taken within combat zones).
On January 15 2010 00:42 ghostWriter wrote: Why did Donald Rumsfeld try to win a war rapidly with the smallest number of troops possible, forcing us to continually add soldiers as the situation degenerates and inflating the estimates of how much the war will actually cost?
Attempting to streamline the military into lighter, modular forces isn't a bad thing, it was just near impossible to make that transition during an actual war. Rumsfeld may have been a great peace time Secretary.
While it's fun to say in pop culture that the WMDs were fabricated, it's simply not true. I know it's not in your style to do any research, but the US army deployed fully expecting its soldiers to be attacked with chemical weapons, and most of the IRG forces expected they'd have the weapons available to attack with. No one in the international community realized Saddam had them destroyed after Desert Fox, which is exactly what he wanted.
I'm sure there's some corporatism involved, but that's the way the American political system works and has always worked. There's always an economic component, and I don't think they ever tried to hide the fact that oil played had a role in rebuilding the country. In fact, I'm almost positive Wolfowitz, as big of an asshole as he is, openly said as much. It certainly isn't the only factor, however, as there are way better countries to invade if you just want oil money. It may not be as much fun, but you can't ignore the political or social motivations as well.
I know it's not in your style to do any research, but I suppose you meant the chemical weapons that America sold to them to use against Iran during the Iraq-Iran war and that were used to gas the Kurds. Those chemical weapons, correct? And I'm sure Saddam wanted his country to be invaded and destroyed while he was deposed and killed. That seems to be EXACTLY what he wanted.
If it were publicly known that the weapons were destroyed, he would've been at greater threat from other actors within the region. You can certainly argue that WMDs weren't truly the biggest factor (which they likely weren't) but calling them a fabrication is just ignorant. It was fully expected that they'd be used in Nasiriyah and some of the other belts before US troops could enter Iraq, and many Iraqi commanders were only informed of their absence just before the invasion began.
On January 15 2010 01:58 Piy wrote: he can't back out now. Bush and the right wing got America into this mess, Obama has no choice but to conitinue pumping troops into the middle east to appease the right wing and try and maintain stability that was thrown into question when America drove most middle eastern governments into hiding.
I don't think that's the reasoning at all. Yes, let's kill some more poor brown people and our own soldiers so the right wing stays happy.
Most casualty numbers posted by actual nations involved are rarely accurate. If you take a look over figures, there are always various disagreements by historians.
like most said, this war cant be won by soldiers, it will be won by heart. if you really organise that country for that amount and you are out in 1 year. and you got the heart and thankfullness of all living there. ignore the handfull terrorists, the folks will take care on their own on freewill with passion. war over. maybe even 8 months and no chance ever recruiting there for the "terrorists" that want to fight "invaders".
simply art of war. sun tzu. clausewitz not even necessary.
American just went about Vietnam in entirely the wrong way. Britain had a very similar situation in post colonial Malaya (now Malaysia). Anti-colonial forces with international communist backing. However it was dealt with extremely differently (although you could argue the French started going about it the wrong way in Vietnam and the problem was too big to be contained by the time the US got involved). Britain had a lot of experience at exactly this type of war dating back to the 1905 Boer war which they approached in much the same way as America approached Vietnam. The Malayan Emergency was never officially given the status of a war on paper, despite the fact that it was in reality. That technical definition alone helps an awful lot in limiting public protest. The local population were forcibly moved into guarded villages, cutting them off from the guerrillas. These villages were newly constructed for this precise purpose and were in defensible locations and surrounded with barbed wire, floodlights etc. However they were also well furnished and equipped, offering the poorest section of society utilities they previously lacked. Doing this stripped the guerrillas of provisions and recruits and undermined the revolutionary ideals of the population. Britain then struck back with constant special forces operations within the jungle, often using regiments which had fought the Japanese through the jungles of Burma in WWII. These soldiers had all the jungle warfare skills and local knowledge of the guerrillas as well as the ability to call in air strikes and reinforcements. They fought guerrilla warfare with guerrilla warfare with huge logistical advantages to the British forces. There was a campaign for hearts and minds from the outset which at key moments was supported with amnesties for disillusioned insurgents.
The situation was contained, the support cut out from beneath it and the enemies hunted down. It's kind of retarded that Vietnam actually happened after the Malayan Emergency.
EPT![[image loading]](http://rlv.zcache.com/obama_nobel_prize_tee_shirt-p235774170983263446s564_400.jpg)
