So a great deal could be said about the overwhelming strength of the American military however we don’t seem to be able to win wars since WWII.
I wonder if it is a case of us having become too powerful for our own good. When we fight we pull our punches and try to act reasonably. Like for example if the civil war had been fought today Sherman’s burning of Atlanta and march to the sea would have gotten him arrested and his troops probably wouldn’t have supported him.
The firebombing of Dresden and Japan did a lot to break the local people’s will to resist and as a result we didn’t see long insurgencies develop.
It seems like the best way might be to throw out the idea of proportional response and instead use overwhelming, unreasonable force.
An example of what I mean would be that in 2007 almost all of the insurgents in Baghdad were coming from a particular section of the city, so if we had burned that section of the city to the ground and relocated the survivors in small groups throughout the country the insurgency could have ended almost immediately in Baghdad.
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Eta it might also lead to fewer wars as politicians would need to be far more cautious with how they deploy our military since.
Of course we can win wars. But most people don’t want to expend the resources associated with winning. Most of America wants to do just enough to make it seem like we are “doing something” without actually sacrificing anything. And when the goal of any military adventure of the last 16 years has been “Fight and Defeat Terrorism”, then that “war” will never, ever be won simply by bombing people.
If we had goals, we would be able to meet them. But the closest thing we have to a cohesive goal in most of our recent wars is “put all of our shiny military toys to use”. And so that’s what we end up succeeding at doing.
The first Iraq War, our goal was to get Iraq out of Kuwait. And we succeeded at that. And then, having succeeded, we went home. We could have kept fighting, and a lot of folks wanted us to, but there wasn’t any reason to any more. The second Iraq War, we went in without a goal, and it took us a decade to realize that.
In 2004, the Marines carried out an extremely violent retaking of Fallujah, in which somewhere around 20% of the city was destroyed, and several hundred thousands of civilians fled. Within a couple years, the situation seemed to remain pacified in Fallujah – though it isn’t clear to me whether that was because there was nothing left to fight over – but surrounding areas had deteriorated.
The reason that you’ve heard of notable generals like McChrystal and Petraeus is that they essentially disputed the notion that we can create order with overwhelming firepower. When Petraeus took over in Iraq – often called the “surge” – he said the part of that campaign that mattered most was the surge of ideas, not killing.
If the war ends ordnance doesn’t get used then doesn’t get replaced. We’d need a smaller military, so lots of jobs are lost. There are probably a truckload of other economic reasons I’m not considering.
This. In order to win a war you need to first define a victory condition. We keep not doing that, and as a result end up in open-ended conflicts that we can’t possibly win because we never actually defined winning in the first place.
Nothing unreasonable about it. In 1944, we understood that the purpose of a military force was to blow stuff up and kill people. Period.
We have lost that concept. And we need to regain it. We need to stop deploying the military as if they were going onto a playground. The commanders need to be given simple orders: Here’s your objective. Accomplish it. Kill anyone who resists or looks like they are aiding the resistance. Blow up any obstacle in your path.
If we were still operating like this, we wouldn’t be having our soldiers being blown up with IEDs.
I think this view reflects more of a personal quest for vengeance than anything else. I suggest we start with asking military commanders what they need to do to accomplish a political objective, and then decide whether that political objective is worth the cost.
Again, Petraeus’ strategy for the surge in Iraq was not to engage in the type of wonton, reckless killing that you suggest. Do you think the surge worked?
There’s also the matter of the nature of the enemy. We don’t fight wars anymore against regular armies in uniform fighting for a central government of a nation that would surrender and agree to play nice after. We fight asymmetrically against nebulous guerrilla fighters that can hide among the populace or in holes. They have little interest in preserving lives, property or infrastructure. The resources and destruction needed to defeat them is somewhere between “not worth it” and “bike it from orbit.”
Is like getting a brain tumor out by removing half the brain.
In general, Americas military power is so huge that other nations don’t really see any chance of winning in a straight fight. So, obviously, they try not to get into unwinnable fights.
Conflicts become insurgencies, guerilla wars, etc. Things the military isn’t all that well set up to deal with. And where military response often creates surges of recruitment and funding for the targets.
Short answer, because people don’t want to get into unwinnable fights.
When it comes to conventional warfare, the US is the most effective force.
When it comes to asymmetrical warfare, the effective means either 1: take a long time and are seldom clearly decisive such as the means the US employs in Afghanistan 2: provide quick pacification but would be considered war crimes. It would involve collective punishment of the civilian population on a large scale. If you find yourself talking/acting like the Cato the Elder, Trotsky, the Turkish triumvirate or Milosevic, you may want to reconsider your opinions.
It did? There was firebombing and there wasn’t a long insurgency but is it generally accept among informed commentators that lack of insurgency was caused by firebombing? I can see someone wishing that it did but it would be nice to hear an educated opinion on this question rather than relying on a hunch that historical facts match one’s bloodlust.
Utter nonsense. In 1944 the purpose was to cripple the ability of the enemy to fight and get them to surrender. This was accomplished in ways a lot more complicated than just blowing stuff up and killing people.
The work done to rebuild the defeated countries afterwards was just as important as the military victory, without it there’d be forever wars with Germans and Japanese still.
The reason American soldiers are still being blown up with IEDs is that the countries invaded and defeated in the previous decades were messed up powder kegs and that even the restraint you dismiss worked as recruitment tools to people outside the region considering themselves kin to the residents of those broken countries.
America is afraid to win a war, because it would be seen as an aggressive rogue state if it did. (In many quarters, it already is.) Instead, in my views, the principle object of the Pentagon is to perpetuate local stalemates long enough for the corporate military-industrial complex to come away with healthy profits.
Some conspicuous examples would be Nicaragua and El Salvador, which could have been wrapped up as quickly as Grenada and Panama. But dragged on for years of arms profiteering.
I find your argument quite unlikely.
As counter-examples, the scorched earth policy you seem to advocate was tried by the Germans in Russia-result, a defeated Germany and intense hatred to this day in Russia.
The French in Algeria tried tactics similar to your proposal, they lost.
In the 20th century, I can’t think of a case where your ideas ever actually worked.
As for killing anyone who “looks like they are aiding the resistance”, well the SS tried that in WW II, it is not a model I want the US to emulate.
That’s the real answer. Since WWII or maybe Korea, the world realized that the US military was well-nigh unstoppable in what’s called a force-on-force war, meaning that their armed forces square off vs. ours in open battle, like they did up until Korea.
So we don’t end up fighting other countries much anymore. When we have- Iraq in 1991 and 2003, and to some extent, Afghanistan/Taliban in 2001, we’ve stomped the complete shit out of them in a horrific way on the battlefield.
What ends up happening is that the smart, surviving ones know that the way to fight a colossus like the US is to fight what’s called an asymmetrical war, meaning something along the lines of an insurgency or guerrilla war. In Iraq, this was the second phase in 2003, after we’d utterly crushed Saddam’s army. In Vietnam, the Viet Cong started off like this, and in Afghanistan, it was pretty much this from the beginning as well.
The problem is that these asymmetrical conflicts are extremely hard to win. First, you have to define what winning means, and then you have to figure out how to do that when you can’t really even tell who the bad guys are, and on top of that, you have to do it among the innocent citizenry who is probably not too fond of either side. And as the US, we’re generally unwilling to resort to extremely violent measures to pacify insurgencies, unlike other nations throughout history.
That’s why we haven’t “won” in a while; we haven’t been fighting wars that we’re suited to, and that we can’t really prosecute in ways that win, as they’re against our moral compass.