Give us a clear enemy with things we can occupy or destroy and sure; we can win. The problem now is most of our enemies only have ideas and the ground under their feet. That is a much harder fight to have a clear victory in.
I kind of feel like it’s not just limited to America. How long has Russia been fighting in Ukraine? Or Chechnya? Or look at any of the other various conflicts around the world.
Most wars are no longer fought between states using conventional armies to occupy territory and destroy infrastructure until one side or the other capitulates. Most conflicts are asymmetrical conflicts between states and loose networks of non-state entities like insurgents, paramilitaries, terrorists criminal organizations and individual actors. And many of these conflicts have an ethnic or religious component.
And as these groups are distributed and often only loosely connected, there is often no controlling entity to “turn it off”. i.e. killing Osama Bin Ladin does not bring an end to Al Quada.
[QUOTE=drewder ]
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.
[/quote]
Sure it would. Because nothing ends an insurgency faster than spreading the survivors of a horrific massacre around the countryside, telling their tales of the enemy’s atrocities.
This is part of the problem in that you can’t just “bomb and blow up” your way to victory. It doesn’t take a lot of terrorists or rebels to cause a lot of trouble.
This seriously mischaracterizes the situation.
Firstly, strategic bombing (fire- or other) failed to break the morale of any of the populations it was tried on in the Second World War. In fact, a foundational assumption of “area bombing” – a British euphemism for killing civilians – was that while WE are tough-minded and will never surrender, even when the going gets tough, THEY are weak, of dubious moral character, cowardly, subjugated by their cruel masters, soft, or otherwise likely to cave in once the bombing begins in earnest. In the experience of being bombed, most populations grimly buckled down and kept supporting the war, just like the British did during the “Blitz.” The assumption that the enemy is unlike us (especially that they are weak) is usually a false assumption and has little military value.
Secondly, the reasons there were no significant insurgencies in Germany and Japan after the war are complex, but the main factors were:
-
In both countries, large numbers of bitter-end military fanatics were killed outright as the war drew to a close, depriving any potential insurgency of its natural base.
-
In both countries, Allied postwar support, in the form of food, medicine, money, opportunity and alliance was immediate and plentiful.
-
In Japan, the Emperor remained a nominal figurehead, and he had urged acceptance of defeat. This was a culturally potent counter to the urge to carry on the fight.
I too think this fallacy crops up often - not just in war, but in politics, business negotiation, etc. “Attacking us means our resolve will be strengthened, but attacking the enemy will weaken their resolve.”
I see some partial, and a couple of mostly wise posts, but still too many stilted posturings by people who simply want to answer by saying some sort of veiled insult against whoever they most love to hate and blame.
Looking into the past WITHOUT buying in to all the government propaganda, the seeming stark difference between the wars of the early Twentieth Century, and the wars that followed, is not nearly as clear as the opening post suggests.
One very great factor in the perception of all this, is that we are still primarily populated by the generation which grew up in the immediate SHADOW of World War two. I was myself born in the 1950’s, and I can say for certain that the post-war self-indulgent self-worshiping self-congratulations by the United States of itself, were a non-stop clamoring racket that didn’t even begin to pause, until the 1970’s.
A quick look back at ALL of the wars of the United States is in order for this thread.
After 1789, when our nation functionally began…
-
We fought Britain in 1812. Despite the impression that you may have gotten in school about how bravely we fought, and how we once again drove back those silly Brits, we really didn’t win a significant victory in that war at all. It was mostly a muddled mess, which ended more because Britain wanted to have done with us so it could get back to fighting France, than because we accomplished anything.
-
The war of imperial conquest that we fought against Mexico, in order to steal Texas and the rest of the Southwest, was fairly successful. Not all that glorious, nor something which would qualify as a 'righteous" war, but fairly successful.
-
The Spanish American war was even more of a put up job, with us attacking a much lesser foe, for trumped up reasons now known to be entirely false, so that we could grab a world-sized Empire from Spain. Again, pretty successful, but not much of an accomplishment, from a war-fighting standpoint.
-
World War 1: we waited until all the European nations were almost exhausted to join into that one, and still only played a relatively small part militarily. While we like to pretend here that it was the US entry into the war which caused the tide to turn, and resulted in overwhelming victory, the truth is rather more complex. While we certainly contributed to victory, we didn’t even come close to winning the peace. If we and our allies had handled that mess correctly, World War 2 would not have occurred.
-
We also waited a good long time to enter World War 2. We did come closer to being the true primary victors of that conflagration, but that was again more because our own lands were not invaded (much), but all of our allies suffered near complete physical destruction.
And we allowed Communist Russia to conquer and keep half of Europe, take parts of Japan, and expand Communist influence into China, Korea, and elsewhere in the Pacific basin.
Luckily, we didn’t have such traitorous people as we do now, or Eisenhower might have been attacked as Bush and Obama have been, because it is certainly true that the reason why we had to continue to fight AND NOT WIN ANYWHERE following WW2, was because of the mistakes made by the US under Truman and Eisenhower’s leadership.
The reason why the wars in Korea and Vietnam were not won, was directly because of the fact that World War Two was NOT properly fought to a real and thorough victory. But our propaganda about that war, to this day, says otherwise.
It doesn’t really make sense to get too hung up on declaring clear cut goals for victory, as some posters have harped on. Setting an artificially straightforward goal may make it APPEAR that a war is won, but in reality, it can mean that the war is actually lost. Take the infamous “mission accomplished” signs, following the very short excursion into Afghanistan. Declaring in advance that we would overthrow the corrupt government there, and turn Afghanistan over to it’s own people (remember Bush promised NO NATION BUILDING), meant that we marched in, wiped out all semblance of organized government, and then declared victory. Then while we still hadn’t even begun to clean up our mess there (and thereby allowed enemies to start taking American weaponry for their own use), we jumped into Iraq, and rapidly declared “victory” there as well. Declaring clear goals did NOT cause us to have a successful war. They just allowed certain people to get patted on the back for their “victory,” and then start blaming the NEXT guy in office, for not being able to clean up the horrid mess that the previous leaders left.
Long story short, the last time the United States ACTUALLY clearly won a serious war, was 1898. Not 1945.
You’ll have to excuse me if I feel slightly uncomfortable aligning my view of human life with the people who see other people as targets on a shooting range. This kind of thinking is horrifying. It’s also totally unfounded. How much would people have to bomb the USA for people like the Bundys and the Oathbreakers to lose heart?
I don’t understand what you mean by “as if going onto a playground”. Is your assertion that if we sent our troops into Afghanistan and let them run amok destroying and killing everything, we would achieve some sort of measurable victory? Because that didn’t work out so great for the Soviets.
Maybe a better idea would be to stop thinking about war like we’re playing the Super Bowl? That is to say, two armies meet on some designated spot, fight it out until someone wins and then victory is declared and celebrated for all time.
Because as **igor frankensteen **pointed out, it’s not that simple. When you destroy a nation’s government or capacity to make war, you create a power vacuum. And if you aren’t willing to stick around to “win the peace”, someone else will come in and fill that vacuum. And they might actually be worse and will certainly play up the resentment regarding the massive army that just invaded them.
Or as World War II pointed out, even after a decisive victory, once the mutual threat disappears, allies of convenience can quickly turn into rivals.
And I don’t understand this conservative meme that “we don’t understand that war is killing and breaking shit”. We dropped more bombs in Vietnam than were dropped in all World War 2. We rolled over the Iraqi army in Desert Storm in a matter of weeks. Our military can destroy any building or kill any person they can locate anywhere in the world using drones, airstrikes or special operations raids and we do it almost with impunity. And yet this narrative that we aren’t blowing enough shit up continues to perpetuate.
The problem it seems to me is that we don’t have clear objectives when going into war, nor a long term strategic vision. At least not one that lasts beyond the next election.
Wars are almost entirely fought for economic reasons. Lots of people are in trouble. We don’t fight wars for all of them.
It is also not out of the question to imagine the military-industrial complex applying the same short-sighted profit-based goals to warfighting as any other large industry.
Another vote for we can win the war but we can’t win the peace.
With the accessibility of weapons, home-made bombs, communications, etc., determined jerks can fight on forever.
And it’s not just us. Any country will have problems. Look at the USSR after WWII fighting the Forest Brothers. This was 60+ years ago and against Stalin. Someone who had no qualms about fighting dirty and hard.
Start up a similar situation now in that area and they don’t even have to stick to the forests. The cities make a decent environment for fighting. You pretty much have to depopulate an area to pacify it.
Look at Chechnya. Took the Russians 10 years of absolutely brutal war to “win”. But there’s still fighting and terrorism going on with no end in sight.
I don’t believe the US can defeat any determined, capable enemy- whether that enemy be a regular or an irregular force.
Marcus Flavius: I can read your statement in two ways…
- There is at least one potential enemy that we could not defeat.
- We cannot defeat any potential enemy at all.
I hope you didn’t mean the latter: if war came with Cuba, they’d collapse like a house of cards. But the former is quite possibly true: we cannot defeat China or Russia by conventional warfare, because it could not be kept from escalating into a civilization-maimed nuclear exchange.
(Even in a purely conventional war, I don’t know if the U.S. could defeat China. We could devastate them by a bombing campaign – destroy their economy – but they’d still be in control of their own territory.)
I think we sometimes fetishize “determination” and “fighting spirit” too much. At a certain point, a superior force will defeat a (regular-force) underdog, no matter how determined the underdog may be.
Defeating doesn’t have to mean conquest. Saddam’s Iraq was defeated in Kuwait in 1991 but still held on to its own land.
Ha ha ha…oh, my no! There isn’t a national military on this planet that the US couldn’t singlehandedly crush most rikki tik. After the crushing of their military, we’ll probably tie up our golf shoes and commence to tramping on our peckers, though.
So we blow up all their tanks, ships and aircraft. The problem always remains “now what do we do with the rest of the country?”
We don’t necessarily have to “do anything with the rest of the country.” Not all wars have to be of the Iraq-occupation, Afghanistan-occupation model.
When Britain defeated Argentina in the 1982 Falklands War, it didn’t have to occupy Argentina. Merely ousting Argentina from the Falklands sufficed as the victory. Same again for the Gulf War in 1991.
In many wars, blowing up the tanks, ships, aircraft, etc. *is *the victory. No subsequent occupation of the defeated country is necessary, or desirable.
Then what is the point?
The falklands war ended with the british occupying the falklands.
The first gulf war was about us securing territory in kuwait. We didn’t hold onto it for ourselves, but we still removed an occupying force and put our own in instead.
If you don’t get something out of going to war, then why did you go to war?
The US has been playing the world’s police for a while now, and so has been waging war on more “ideological” principles of protecting human rights or enforcing borders, but that is a historical anomaly.
Virtually ever war ever fought prior to WWII has ended with the victor holding the territory being fought over, and most wars since have been that way as well.
That’s a different goalpost location than the original goalpost. Sometimes war isn’t about taking a piece of territory. It’s about denying an enemy from getting that piece of territory.
But even that is not the point I was addressing. My point was that you don’t have to occupy the enemy homeland to be “victorious”. You can merely thwart the enemy’s goals of conquering some ally territory (or part of your own territory,) and call that a victory and call it a day.
Not so fast…
Winter war, 1939.
Whether you are taking it, denying it to your enemy, or saving it for an ally, it is the same thing. The land has a strategic or economic value, and you wish it to be occupied by a population that is friendly to you.
Probably, yes.
But this was the starting point I was replying to:
My point was that one does not necessarily have to “do” anything with the rest of the enemy’s country. Depending on the circumstances of the war, the enemy’s homeland can be left more or less intact and there is no need for counter-insurgency or occupation. Blowing up “all their tanks, ships and aircraft” may be perfectly sufficient for winning such a war.