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On January 21 2021 06:14 micronesia wrote:Show nested quote +On January 21 2021 06:02 Nevuk wrote:
The US hasn't really been able to crush anyone in a war for about 7 decades. We just acted like we could and eventually everyone believed it (in spite of a string of embarrassing losses/draws) All of our real power was of the soft kind, and Trump pissed all over that. Sure, we can bomb the shit out of anyone, but that's not actually enough to win any sort of prolonged war. Some of our soft power was also our Hollywood propaganda where we constantly portrayed our military as the strongest on Earth in popular culture everywhere.
This is a complicated topic but I think at a minimum you need to clarify what you are saying because as stated it is demonstrably false. Iraq was "crushed" during the Gulf War (~1990) and Iraq War (~2003 although much less justified). The coalition included other nations besides the U.S., but the U.S. could have succeeded without the support of the other nations if it were necessary. For the majority of non-landlocked nations in the world, U.S. naval and aerial bombardment will establish dominance very quickly in an all out war. The demonstrated area of weakness in this case was not military might but what to do after declaring victory on the battlefield, which is much more complicated.
The Vietnam war was a failure due mostly to poor civilian leadership, not pure war fighting capability. If North Vietnam had bombed Pearl Harbor, they would have been completely defeated very quickly. What would happen if the U.S. suddenly went to war with other major players is much less clear although the U.S. still has the greatest capability for controlling blue waters overall (and the gap is shrinking).
I had a longer thing typed up but it was basically a side note so I wasn't going to get into it unless anyone asked.
I entirely agree with the bolded. It's not the US military is bad : it's very good. It's that our political setup for using it is awful. Essentially, the US has a very bad political system for fighting in a war with any measure of difficulty at all: the leader of our military is also our elected leader: any sort of loss is going to play poorly at home, even if it is a strategically necessary. There is simply no political will for prolonged engagements. This mattered less in the initial setup where we might not hear about battles for months after they happen, but now that we knew about them in hours I don't see it working at all.
While some stuff overlaps between General and politician, it's not really that much. The only difficult wars we've ever won were where we took a very rare step and appointed someone with more authority than the president - Grant in the civil war and Eisenhower in WW2. There are a lot of known examples where Grant not being beholden to the wills of the press/public meant that he was able to take politically controversial actions to end the war faster (The Battle of the Wilderness is the most well-known one, I think, and where Grant was first anointed as the Butcher in the press).
Also, technically, none of those were Wars by the US standard. We haven't declared a war since the Korean War, which was essentially a draw. As far as 2001 + 2003 wars go, I don't think we can count those as a victory. I'm still not sure what our goal was in Iraq, only that we're still there nearly 2 decades later for literally no gain. Ditto Afghanistan.
The first Gulf War was the of the type that America has historically been very good at (like the Spanish American War) : a very short war with a clearly defined objective against an enemy who was vastly weaker than the US that lasted 100 hours from start to finish. (I mentally skipped over it when adding up the tally, since mentally I don't put it in the same category as a prolonged war).
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United States43251 Posts
On January 21 2021 06:14 micronesia wrote:
The Vietnam war was a failure due mostly to poor civilian leadership, not pure war fighting capability. If North Vietnam had bombed Pearl Harbor, they would have been completely defeated very quickly.
This disagrees with my understanding of the conflict. NV was willing to sustain heavy losses, had an experienced army, and had near limitless materiel support from China and the USSR. It wasn’t a winnable war, they could destroy NV but not conquer it.
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United States24741 Posts
If Operation Linebacker had started earlier (vice Operation Rolling Thunder pre Nixon), the U.S. would have "won" the war in 2 months, according to the reading I've done on the topic. It may not have been a winnable war the way the 2003 attack on Iraq was won quickly but not necessarily a win in the longer-term sense.
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On January 21 2021 08:01 KwarK wrote:Show nested quote +On January 21 2021 06:14 micronesia wrote:
The Vietnam war was a failure due mostly to poor civilian leadership, not pure war fighting capability. If North Vietnam had bombed Pearl Harbor, they would have been completely defeated very quickly. This disagrees with my understanding of the conflict. NV was willing to sustain heavy losses, had an experienced army, and had near limitless materiel support from China and the USSR. It wasn’t a winnable war, they could destroy NV but not conquer it.
It comes down to is how one defines "winning" the war.
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United States43251 Posts
On January 21 2021 08:15 micronesia wrote:
If Operation Linebacker had started earlier (vice Operation Rolling Thunder pre Nixon), the U.S. would have "won" the war in 2 months, according to the reading I've done on the topic. It may not have been a winnable war the way the 2003 attack on Iraq was won quickly but not necessarily a win in the longer-term sense.
My layman's understanding from watching things like the Ken Burns documentary is that it was, at its root, a continuation of the French colonial occupation which was untenable when faced with a unified national independence movement with an external source of military materiel. The Americans saw it as a war to help a beleaguered national government defend itself from foreign sponsored communist radicals but the Vietnamese were fighting the war for national sovereignty over a decade before the Americans got involved. The Americans fundamentally failed to understand why the Vietnamese fought and why they would continue to fight until the occupying forces left. If you haven't seen it it's worth a watch, there are a lot of remarkable interviews with former NVA, ARVN, VC etc. fighters.
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On January 21 2021 08:15 micronesia wrote:
If Operation Linebacker had started earlier (vice Operation Rolling Thunder pre Nixon), the U.S. would have "won" the war in 2 months, according to the reading I've done on the topic. It may not have been a winnable war the way the 2003 attack on Iraq was won quickly but not necessarily a win in the longer-term sense.
The US has a consistent problem when it goes into wars, which is where it has an excellent insertion strategy but a bad or nonexistent exist strategy, and often a surprisingly vague understanding of the areas its going.
Vietnam's a pass because the French kind of tossed that into the US's lap, but Iraq was an inexcusably enormous fuck up, entirely because there was no real strategy and no goal beyond 'topple Saddam'. So the US (and UK, because we were the US's lapdog back then) wandered in, shot everything up then hero posed and just kind of stuck around for a while as the region turned into absolute hell.
You'd think Western governments (I'm letting the military off in part because pretty much everything from the military side I've read post-Iraq said they thought the whole idea was a bad one from the start) would have learned from the colossal shitshow we've collectively been 'enjoying' over in Afghanistan but apparently not..
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Some minor comments and happenings I picked up after the inauguration.
-Biden is planning on running again in 2024, said by Chris Coons, who is very close to the president. Biden would be 81-82 by then.[1]
-Dubya Bush told Clyburn that he's a "savior" because his endorsement in South Carolina catapulted Biden to victory in the primaries, and Bush believes Biden was the only one who could have won. [2]
-The most prominent portrait of a former president in the Oval Office is of FDR, replacing Andrew Jackson. Appropriate for the moment. [3]
On January 21 2021 09:40 KwarK wrote:Show nested quote +On January 21 2021 08:15 micronesia wrote:
If Operation Linebacker had started earlier (vice Operation Rolling Thunder pre Nixon), the U.S. would have "won" the war in 2 months, according to the reading I've done on the topic. It may not have been a winnable war the way the 2003 attack on Iraq was won quickly but not necessarily a win in the longer-term sense. My layman's understanding from watching things like the Ken Burns documentary is that it was, at its root, a continuation of the French colonial occupation which was untenable when faced with a unified national independence movement with an external source of military materiel. The Americans saw it as a war to help a beleaguered national government defend itself from foreign sponsored communist radicals but the Vietnamese were fighting the war for national sovereignty over a decade before the Americans got involved. The Americans fundamentally failed to understand why the Vietnamese fought and why they would continue to fight until the occupying forces left. If you haven't seen it it's worth a watch, there are a lot of remarkable interviews with former NVA, ARVN, VC etc. fighters.
Robert McNamara was interviewed in another excellent documentary The Fog of War and largely corroborates on this. He talked to a Vietnamese foreign minister decades after the war and the foreign minister said,
Mr. McNamara, You must never have read a history book. If you'd had, you'd know we weren't pawns of the Chinese or the Russians. McNamara, didn't you know that? Don't you understand that we have been fighting the Chinese for 1000 years? We were fighting for our independence. And we would fight to the last man. And we were determined to do so. And no amount of bombing, no amount of U.S. pressure would ever have stopped us.
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Please, please, PLEASE fucking do not let him run again in 2024, christ almighty. What happened to him wanting to be a one term president? Where has that gone? He give up on it already? Can we start to pry the decrepit fingers of this geriatric generation off of America's steering wheel yet...
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On January 21 2021 09:58 PhoenixVoid wrote:- The most prominent portrait of a former president in the Oval Office is of FDR, replacing Andrew Jackson. Appropriate for the moment. [ 3]
I hope this means Biden is more open to FDR-style policy than he was previously but I won't hold my breath. I'm glad to see Andrew Jackson's portrait leaving. He is one of the worst Presidents in U.S. history and he shouldn't be honored by our government.
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The problem with china being able to match the US militarily is that it doesn't really matter. People think that china is just making fake islands with bases in the south china sea because of imperialism when in reality they have no other way to benefit their position. America has oil and more farmable land than it knows what to do with. China doesn't have oil or the ability to feed itself. They're sprawling int he south china sea with fake islands because it needs the oil and food imports from the rest of asia africa and south america to continue to exist. America can't dream of invading china but if they sit on a line from Japan, the Phillippines Tiawan Singapore to india they simply starve China from exporting products and importing food and oil.
And what can china do in response? reach out across the pacific like Japan tried in WW2? No china has always been thinking longer term than any other people on the globe. They will continue to invade other nations economically and abuse everyone in their way until people simply have no other option.
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On January 21 2021 11:10 Sermokala wrote:
The problem with china being able to match the US militarily is that it doesn't really matter. People think that china is just making fake islands with bases in the south china sea because of imperialism when in reality they have no other way to benefit their position. America has oil and more farmable land than it knows what to do with. China doesn't have oil or the ability to feed itself. They're sprawling int he south china sea with fake islands because it needs the oil and food imports from the rest of asia africa and south america to continue to exist. America can't dream of invading china but if they sit on a line from Japan, the Phillippines Tiawan Singapore to india they simply starve China from exporting products and importing food and oil.
And what can china do in response? reach out across the pacific like Japan tried in WW2? No china has always been thinking longer term than any other people on the globe. They will continue to invade other nations economically and abuse everyone in their way until people simply have no other option.
One of the things that is interesting to me is that there will never be a military conflict between any of the following: EU/USA/RU/CN. The whole mutual destruction thing means most of this stuff doesn't matter. Conflict will only happen when one of those 4 have no other options. Which is why I think a lot of foreign policy should revolve around the others having enough to not suffer but not enough to tip the scales of power.
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What? There can absolutely be military conflicts. What there can't be, at least in the near term, is military conquest of those states' homelands.
If China invaded Taiwan tomorrow we would absolutely end up with US and Chinese troops shooting at each other. That's not prevented by MAD because the US will not invoke MAD for Taiwan.
For MAD to prevent the conflict, the state whose homeland is threatened needs to control the nukes themselves, or be so critical that a nuclear power would gg if it were taken.
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On January 21 2021 12:05 Belisarius wrote:
What? There can absolutely be military conflicts. What there can't be, at least in the near term, is military conquest of those states' homelands.
If China invaded Taiwan tomorrow we would absolutely end up with US and Chinese troops shooting at each other. That's not prevented by MAD because the US will not invoke MAD for Taiwan.
For MAD to prevent the conflict, the state whose homeland is threatened needs to control the nukes themselves, or be so critical that a nuclear power would gg if it were taken.
The US wouldn't need to invoke MAD when China would just be starved of food and oil and would either threaten nukes or be overthrown by their own people over a lack of food. China controls a legitimately large amount of rare earth metals so the rest of the world would have their electronics supply disrupted causing people to revolt over a loss of iphones. its Still MAD by other means than nukes.
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On January 21 2021 10:08 Zambrah wrote:
Please, please, PLEASE fucking do not let him run again in 2024, christ almighty. What happened to him wanting to be a one term president? Where has that gone? He give up on it already? Can we start to pry the decrepit fingers of this geriatric generation off of America's steering wheel yet...
he has been in office for like 5 minutes lol.
making plans and acting on them are two very different things, just ask any person. let alone a politician for that matter... let's wait and see what he's gonna do now, assess if it's any good. as his term inches closer to the end voters will have plenty of chances to pry power from his old hands...
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On January 21 2021 12:34 Sermokala wrote:Show nested quote +On January 21 2021 12:05 Belisarius wrote:
What? There can absolutely be military conflicts. What there can't be, at least in the near term, is military conquest of those states' homelands.
If China invaded Taiwan tomorrow we would absolutely end up with US and Chinese troops shooting at each other. That's not prevented by MAD because the US will not invoke MAD for Taiwan.
For MAD to prevent the conflict, the state whose homeland is threatened needs to control the nukes themselves, or be so critical that a nuclear power would gg if it were taken. The US wouldn't need to invoke MAD when China would just be starved of food and oil and would either threaten nukes or be overthrown by their own people over a lack of food. China controls a legitimately large amount of rare earth metals so the rest of the world would have their electronics supply disrupted causing people to revolt over a loss of iphones. its Still MAD by other means than nukes.
The COVID-19 pandemic has shown how China is quite resilient and self-sustaining - politically and economically. The US has fared less well. Now, let's not get into politics, but into the democratic and globalised design of US. The US has, for many decades, thrived on its control over the world order. But more allies means more leverage given away. At any time, some countries can just decide to cut off US trade and supply chain to disrupt its economy massively. Whilst China is also trying to grow its 'soft power', their strategy seems to be more at undermining US' alliance strategy rather than to create alliances of its own. China has always been more upfront about being China-First. China had, for many decades, survived in isolation behind its great wall. So if WW3 ever breaks out (touch wood!), China has more experience in surviving in less optimal living conditions...
That's why I do see some logic about US turning inwards at this point of time. For the sake of national security and economic stability. Or at the least, just forming a bloc of a few trusted allies. Trying to be friends with everyone will eventually make you enemies out of everyone. Just some random musings..
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On January 21 2021 13:28 Doublemint wrote:Show nested quote +On January 21 2021 10:08 Zambrah wrote:
Please, please, PLEASE fucking do not let him run again in 2024, christ almighty. What happened to him wanting to be a one term president? Where has that gone? He give up on it already? Can we start to pry the decrepit fingers of this geriatric generation off of America's steering wheel yet... he has been in office for like 5 minutes lol. making plans and acting on them are two very different things, just ask any person. let alone a politician for that matter... let's wait and see what he's gonna do now, assess if it's any good. as his term inches closer to the end voters will have plenty of chances to pry power from his old hands...
And if you take your job half as seriously as Biden is it's the most stressful job on the planet, hands down. I'd be surprised if he did this into his eighties and still wants to do more. We saw Obama's hair turn grey in a couple years.
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On January 21 2021 13:28 Doublemint wrote:Show nested quote +On January 21 2021 10:08 Zambrah wrote:
Please, please, PLEASE fucking do not let him run again in 2024, christ almighty. What happened to him wanting to be a one term president? Where has that gone? He give up on it already? Can we start to pry the decrepit fingers of this geriatric generation off of America's steering wheel yet... he has been in office for like 5 minutes lol. making plans and acting on them are two very different things, just ask any person. let alone a politician for that matter... let's wait and see what he's gonna do now, assess if it's any good. as his term inches closer to the end voters will have plenty of chances to pry power from his old hands...
There is no chance the Democrats let someone try and primary him if he wants a second term, so the only way voters will have any ability to keep him from the presidency is by voting Republican which is also shit.
We need this old generation to step down gracefully, all of this plan making for "well maybe Ill just be in office for as long as I can possibly sustain" is crappy. Let the next generation of politicians get some breathing room. This goes for more than just Biden, Feinstein obviously is another one. Pelosi is another one. I hope Bernie feels like he can step down at some point in the near future too, hes getting up there.
Let us see who our potential future leaders might be and what directions theyll want to go in, I'm tired of seeing what the Reaganites think America should be.
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On January 21 2021 07:34 Nevuk wrote:Show nested quote +On January 21 2021 06:14 micronesia wrote:On January 21 2021 06:02 Nevuk wrote:
The US hasn't really been able to crush anyone in a war for about 7 decades. We just acted like we could and eventually everyone believed it (in spite of a string of embarrassing losses/draws) All of our real power was of the soft kind, and Trump pissed all over that. Sure, we can bomb the shit out of anyone, but that's not actually enough to win any sort of prolonged war. Some of our soft power was also our Hollywood propaganda where we constantly portrayed our military as the strongest on Earth in popular culture everywhere.
This is a complicated topic but I think at a minimum you need to clarify what you are saying because as stated it is demonstrably false. Iraq was "crushed" during the Gulf War (~1990) and Iraq War (~2003 although much less justified). The coalition included other nations besides the U.S., but the U.S. could have succeeded without the support of the other nations if it were necessary. For the majority of non-landlocked nations in the world, U.S. naval and aerial bombardment will establish dominance very quickly in an all out war. The demonstrated area of weakness in this case was not military might but what to do after declaring victory on the battlefield, which is much more complicated.
The Vietnam war was a failure due mostly to poor civilian leadership, not pure war fighting capability. If North Vietnam had bombed Pearl Harbor, they would have been completely defeated very quickly. What would happen if the U.S. suddenly went to war with other major players is much less clear although the U.S. still has the greatest capability for controlling blue waters overall (and the gap is shrinking). I had a longer thing typed up but it was basically a side note so I wasn't going to get into it unless anyone asked. I entirely agree with the bolded. It's not the US military is bad : it's very good. It's that our political setup for using it is awful. Essentially, the US has a very bad political system for fighting in a war with any measure of difficulty at all: the leader of our military is also our elected leader: any sort of loss is going to play poorly at home, even if it is a strategically necessary. There is simply no political will for prolonged engagements. This mattered less in the initial setup where we might not hear about battles for months after they happen, but now that we knew about them in hours I don't see it working at all. While some stuff overlaps between General and politician, it's not really that much. The only difficult wars we've ever won were where we took a very rare step and appointed someone with more authority than the president - Grant in the civil war and Eisenhower in WW2. There are a lot of known examples where Grant not being beholden to the wills of the press/public meant that he was able to take politically controversial actions to end the war faster (The Battle of the Wilderness is the most well-known one, I think, and where Grant was first anointed as the Butcher in the press). Also, technically, none of those were Wars by the US standard. We haven't declared a war since the Korean War, which was essentially a draw. As far as 2001 + 2003 wars go, I don't think we can count those as a victory. I'm still not sure what our goal was in Iraq, only that we're still there nearly 2 decades later for literally no gain. Ditto Afghanistan. The first Gulf War was the of the type that America has historically been very good at (like the Spanish American War) : a very short war with a clearly defined objective against an enemy who was vastly weaker than the US that lasted 100 hours from start to finish. (I mentally skipped over it when adding up the tally, since mentally I don't put it in the same category as a prolonged war).
I don't really think that this is the problem with the U.S. military at all.
The problems that you've outlined are generic problems that any large nation faces.
The issue with the U.S. and its recent conflicts is that they aren't wars in the traditional sense. The U.S. has been (and still is) absolutely capable of crushing basically any adversary in a total war scenario. The problem is every conflict since Vietnam hasn't been that; it's been an amorphous and directionless conflict with no clear goal and an enemy that was poorly defined.
The U.S.'s record has been spotty (clear losses in Vietnam, victory in the Gulf War, big question mark for Iraq/Afghanistan) because it has been drawn into unwinnable conflicts that it never should've entered in the first place. But back to my original point, the U.S. has been and still is entirely capable of flattening basically any opponent if it went total war on them. The problem is that the last time we saw that kind of war was WW2, and no one wants to see that kind of war again; doing so would be disastrous in terms of international popularity and would be completely unjustifiable unless we suffered something similar to Pearl Harbor again.
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On January 21 2021 13:39 RKC wrote:Show nested quote +On January 21 2021 12:34 Sermokala wrote:On January 21 2021 12:05 Belisarius wrote:
What? There can absolutely be military conflicts. What there can't be, at least in the near term, is military conquest of those states' homelands.
If China invaded Taiwan tomorrow we would absolutely end up with US and Chinese troops shooting at each other. That's not prevented by MAD because the US will not invoke MAD for Taiwan.
For MAD to prevent the conflict, the state whose homeland is threatened needs to control the nukes themselves, or be so critical that a nuclear power would gg if it were taken. The US wouldn't need to invoke MAD when China would just be starved of food and oil and would either threaten nukes or be overthrown by their own people over a lack of food. China controls a legitimately large amount of rare earth metals so the rest of the world would have their electronics supply disrupted causing people to revolt over a loss of iphones. its Still MAD by other means than nukes. The COVID-19 pandemic has shown how China is quite resilient and self-sustaining - politically and economically. The US has fared less well. Now, let's not get into politics, but into the democratic and globalised design of US. The US has, for many decades, thrived on its control over the world order. But more allies means more leverage given away. At any time, some countries can just decide to cut off US trade and supply chain to disrupt its economy massively. Whilst China is also trying to grow its 'soft power', their strategy seems to be more at undermining US' alliance strategy rather than to create alliances of its own. China has always been more upfront about being China-First. China had, for many decades, survived in isolation behind its great wall. So if WW3 ever breaks out (touch wood!), China has more experience in surviving in less optimal living conditions... That's why I do see some logic about US turning inwards at this point of time. For the sake of national security and economic stability. Or at the least, just forming a bloc of a few trusted allies. Trying to be friends with everyone will eventually make you enemies out of everyone. Just some random musings..
This is either terribly thought out propaganda or just madness.
The pandemic hasn't shown chinas resilience or ability to sustain itself in any way. The world isn't stupid enough to see that the corruption and oppression on every level of their government is the very reason why the pandemic got as bad as its getting.
More allies don't mean more leverage given away its more leverage gotten. I have no idea how you could get the notion that having US bases in more countries isn't beneficial to the US. If some countries cut off US trade and supply chain to disrupt its economy the US will still be able to feed itself and purchase the oil to run its economy. If the US cuts off trade and supply chains to countries those countries end overnight with a handful of nations in the world being able to feed themselves AND to supply themselves with oil.
China is one of those nations that can't feed itself or obtain oil without trade going over the ocean. Most of its population is hugging the coast and they import large stocks of their pork supply from the US as it is, even before their issues with pig virus's in 2019.
China survived in isolation and then had Tienimen square. Literaly hundreds of millions of people have moved from their rural farmlands to their coastal mega cities They can't function like they did overnight. Meanwhile the US has a surplus of food and oil from domestic production.
Isolation is weakness and globalism is strength. This is the lesson that china has learned from 1989
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EPT
