I look at some of the tussles going in in Iraq, and even though the people fighting the US Arny are the bad guys, they seem to be giving a pretty good account of themselves given their limited resources.
I look at my neighbors over here in the US, and IMO most would be quivering, prostrate on the floor, if an occupying army with superior firepower was in town. We obviously have a high tech, powerful army, but I wonder if modern, western soft living, would bode well for us if we had to repel an invading army. I don’t think we’re nearly as tough (overall) as we think we are.
I think it’s very difficult to measure anyone’s bravery or toughness. Courage can come at the most unexpected and difficult moments, and people can wimp out at the oddest, most innocuous things.
The people fighting in Iraq are brave, but just as brave, maybe, as some people who stayed in the U.S. and didn’t fight.
I would imagine most Iraqis cower in their basements when the U.S. Army comes rolling through.
The history of resistance movements would suggest that the resistance is often disproportionately made up the unusually brave, the crazy, the outsider, and the criminally oriented. Misfits.
Toughness or bravery is not something you can predict. There are plenty of stories in which a trained soldier freezes up, and others where a grandmother punches an alligator or criminal in the face. A lot of us can tell our own stories about some big tough guy who goes to a military induction center and faints dead away during the blood testing. It doesn’t always go the way you think it will.
I expext that if a foreign nation of a different religion and culture invaded and occupied the USA, there would be as formidable a resistance as is presently being put up in Iraq.
That bit about Americans being soft because of our material wealth has been around for a long time, and it’s proved about as true as the prediction that Japanese couldn’t make good fighter pilots because their mothers carried them on their backs as babies.
Certain national circumstances do seem to translate into how its soldiers perform: during their wars together Australian and Canadians had less aptitude for military bearing than the British, but as individual soldiers were more likely to take thier own initiative. During the Boer War, the British tended to stick to set doctrine, thinking that a cohesive, disiplined army would ultimately prevail, while the Canadians and Austalians said “lets ride off after those Boers they same way they do against us.” This was because riding around in big, open country was something they were used to doing at home. (there’s probably a reason why it was the Canadians who invented the trench raid in WWI, but I wouldn’t want to investigate the dive bars of Toronto to find out).
For Americans, the image of the fat kids on the couch playing video games persists, and although instructors in boot camp do have their hands full reconditioning their physical fitness because of this, these kids actually make better soldiers than their greatgrandfathers did in 1941. What counts is mental toughness.
Those video games are better conditioning against their natural aversion to killing other human beings than their greatgrandfathers games of sandlot baseball. And, The US has a weakers social safety net than most other develped nations (some would argue that this is the reason of our material wealth, but that’s another thread) Every American boy grows up with the message “in this world, you’re on your own, buster,” so weather he’s selling cars or going into combat, he understands that the load is on his shoulders.
think for a minute about those TV shots of Iraqi resistance fighters.Yes, they are brave individuals, but how many of them do you see?
Typically, a group of 3 men , 2 with rifles, and 1 with an RPG launcher, run out of an alley into a wider street, shoot at an American tank and run back into the alley. There must be 500 or 1000 other Iraqis living along that alley and street within shouting distance. But we only see 3 of them.Those 3 , if they are lucky, can kill an American soldier and disable the treads on the tank.So it looks looks like a successful attack-- a “popular uprising” of ordinary Iraqis.
But it only takes 3 brave young men out of the 500 or 1000 locals .
Now imagine the (impossible) situation of the United States being occupied by 135000 foreign soldiers. How many Americans have hunting rifles at home? I’ll bet more than 3 out of 500 or 1000. And how many Americans would use them, if they were really threatened by this foreign army?Every single one, probably.
The NRA is the single most effective lobby in Washington, because its members are fanatically loyal to their guns. Most of the time, I hate 'em for it–but if our country was ever invaded by some foreign army–I’d change my mind .
(And your question is so unlikely, it’s almost science fiction.There is no army in the world which has the logistical ability to transport hundreds of thousands of men and ALL their supplies half way round the planet to invade America. So you " quiver" at the thought.But if it ever became a reality, I 'll bet that the macho beer drinkers in any redneck bar would be able to defend their homes pretty well. (As for yuppie wine drinkers in their sushi bars, you may be right–but they would be quivering on the floor, and very thankful for their tougher neighbors.)
There are LOTS of military veterans, in every American city.
Trench raids were standard British doctrine for the whole war. You may be thinkling of the innovation of creeping bombardment - which was helpful for taking a trench - which was a Canadian invention.
I’m not sure I buy the notion that kids who play “Doom” are better soldiers, but I am very convinced that the notion of wealthy nations being “soft” is horseshit. Generally speaking people, including military leaders, have always been wrong about what makes a good soldier, and many of the commonly desired traits in soldiers - such as an appreciation of drill and deportment and other “bullshit” things - are inversely proportional to a person’s competence as a soldier.
Naturally, it takes a huge amount of courage and bravery, to invade a sovereign nation on the basis of fabrication, and then stay there when you are clearly not wanted.
It helps if you can ensure that the true figures of the casualties of both you, your opponents and also those of non-comabtants can be hidden, that your own shipments of your own dead are delivered back to your own homeland in a semi-secretive manner so that you own populace never get to see the true extent of the price of your activites.
I wonder just how many of todays 100 ‘insurgents’ that were allegedly killed in the most recent operation actually had weapons trained on US troops - we haven’t seen any of their remains.
There is heroism in the scale of media manipulation, and courage to use the sheer brass neck effrontery to pretend that things are moreorless going as planned and somehow the illusion that this war is genuinely about the welfare of the Iraqi people.
Those 3 Iraqis in the alleyway do not have the luxury of six inches of armour plate, plus artillery back up, nor are they able to call up helo strikes as and when convenient, they dont have the supply logistics to back them up, and they dont have the extensive training, nor the propect that their loved ones will be maintained in dignity should they lose their lives as the main wage earners.
American soldiers are men and women doing an unenviable job and doing their best, they are not spectacularly heroic or brave all the time, though some circumstances may cause them to be just that.
Its just a shame that so much good blood is being expended to settle some spurious dispute between two leaders, one of whom is utterly evil, and the other who is a lying scumbag.
Can’t speak for mainstream Americans, since I haven’t been back for two years.
I can tell you, however, that there is a corps of people who volunteer to go to some of the worst places in the world and serve their country, without arms, armor,litle more than our wits and the strategic use of flags.
In the last two years, I’ve witnessed the opening of a mass grave, had to identify victims of a suicide bombing, had to escort seventy VIPs through live minefields (woth with and without personal protective equipment), had guns drawn at me, and had to handle the press during an anthrax scare. Oh, and witnessed ten year-old kids throwing rocks at an 80mm mortar to see what would happen, and a beow-the knee amputee beating his wife with the prosthesis. (Yes, I stopped it.)
I’m doing stuff a liberal arts major(as I was) could only dream about, so yes, I do think some of us are brave enough. I’m a Foreign Service Officer, and I keep getting told what I’ve sen so far is “tame by comparison.”
I don’t doubt for a moment that the U.S. troops are tough and brave - my question is, do we have enough troops there to withstand those that would kill themselves and scores of others to prove their point? It’s hard to fight against those that would kill children in their path, for a religious cause/hatred towards the U.S.
