Putting aside the right or wrong of us going to war in the first place, I would like peoples thoughts on this. I put victory in quotes because I realize we are far from done, I am referring more to the quickness in which we toppled their governments, and dissolved their armies.
Now, to my question…
Was the military victories achieved by the US Armed forces impressive? They did topple two established governments in a very short time frame with little casualties on our side. Of course when you look at who the enemy was, it does diminish the achievement some… but still.
And while we don’t “control” those countries, we could, if we wanted to be brutal oppressive invaders. We have the resources, we just don’t have the stomach for it.
I am by no means a military history buff so my ability to contrast and compare through the ages is not good. So, do we deserve the to be considered the best Armed forces in history or no?
I don’t think it’s possible to come to this type of conclusion, based on these events.
I think it’s akin to a grown man walking down to the local school, beating up the 6th grade school bully, and then declaring himself to be the baddest guy in the city. Is he? I dunno, but we certainly shouldn’t assume so based on what happened on the playground.
LilShieste
Yes…they were very impressive. To put it in perspective, there is no other country in the world who could have done what we did in Iraq…and very few who could have done what we did in Afghanistan.
Why? Because there aren’t any countries that can project that kind of force so far beyond their own borders (not to mention there are few countries who have that kind of force TOO project), and none that can support said forces in the field for such a sustained period.
War isn’t about who has the bestest tank…its about training (which no other country on the planet matches for such a large force) and about logistics.
Thats a completely different question and not one I’m going to answer myself. I’ll just say I disagree that we COULD be such an oppressive invader and leave it at that.
I think you don’t know what you are talking about.
Gods, what a mess…and I’m past my edit time! Maybe a friendly mod will wander in and fix my screwed up quote tags…
Sorry, it was intended for you. Not to be harsh, but your analogy falls flat IMHO. THe US did in fact pick a fight with Iraq…but we didn’t pick one with Afghanistan. In addition, it was MUCH less easy than you are indicating. A better analogy would be that a grown man picks a fight with a young teen ager by traveling half way around the world (while shipping all his food and water in from home), meeting that teen ager on his own turf. Also, that this trip is not something any other man in the world could take with any kind of expectation to actually win the fight against this teen ager.
If Iraq was located in Mexico or Canada then you would have a better point…
Nevermind - I see how the quote tags got messed up now. I also understand what you mean.
It seems possible to come to this conclusion without even taking Iraq and Afghanistan into consideration. Are our armed forces extremely well trained? Hell yes. Do they have a great number of resources at their disposal? You bet.
I think if we were the best military in history, though, we wouldn’t be having the problems we’re currently having in Iraq. As you said, it’s not about who has the bestest tank; it’s about logistics. And while we’re doing admirably well with the situation we’ve placed ourselves in, the fact that we placed ourselves into the situation in the first place is the reason why I’m reluctant to stamp us with the “best ever” label.
So, I guess my main problem is more with the occupation than with the invasion. Since that is the case, and since it sounds like the OP was interested more in debating the latter, I would be fine with retracting my earlier statement. (If the former enters into it, though, that’s a different story.)
on preview…
No worries. A second reading of your post cleared things up.
I’ll concede those points, regarding my analogy. Although I would add that the grown man is packed to the teeth with high-tech weaponry, and is highly trained in the art of kicking-your-ass-fu. However, based on what you described in your earlier post, this would probably help your point more than it would mine.
Also, I completely withdraw my analogy from being used with our involvement in Afghanistan. In retrospect, I agree with your point on that.
LilShieste
Sounds like the problem is logistics, not difficulty of actual battle. America is capable of taking the war to anywhere in the world, yes, that is cool. America used this power to go and kick the crap out of a couple ‘teenagers’. Not so cool.
Give or take the equalizing power of atomic weaponry (and even then, we have lots more country to burn than some), america has the best or one of the best military forces inthe world. (I’m not up on my first-world countries. We do have more people available to conscript than some, though.) However, being the big guy on the block makes it less impressive that we won. Now, if we’d done it with one guy in his shorts and a knife between his teeth as his only weapon, now that would have been impressive. Or if we’d militarily conquered the euroean union. But, even with the logistics, the inequality of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars don’t impress me. (And our follow-through is terrible!)
It’s all in how you define “impressive”, I suppose.
If you remember, in Afghanistan we didn’t use a lot of troops, but used special forces in support of the local Afghni anti-Taliban forces. Considering the Russian experience, we did damn good.
In Iraq on the other hand, we beat up an army that had been weakened by a decade of sanctions, some of whom no doubt decided to melt into the insurgency. I don’t think you can even make a comparison with other wars, in the sense that they weren’t tested. As for after, the politicians screwed the pooch so badly I doubt you can blame the army all that much, though it is a bit depressing that the idea that we should kill the insurgents, not just push them out of a city to fight again, is considered a bold new strategy.
I think the problem here is that we are also trying to conduct the war and our presence in Iraq in the most humane way possible, all things considered. We have striven from the beginning to conduct the war with minimal loss of civilian life, and we are trying hard not to be occupiers in the conventional sense. If we were to conduct our occupation in the brutal, crushing manner of the Nazis or certain communist regimes, we would likely face far fewer of these types of problems than we do now.
This is a bit like saying “Well, the only problem with using fusion power is a small problem with that magnetic thingy…we gots lots of hydrogen”. Battle is all ABOUT logistics. No logistics, no battle.
Well, its debatable how ‘cool’ it is…and besides the point. That point being the US is the ONLY power capable of taking a conventional war anywhere in the world for any length of time.
Again, this is debatable and not really related to the OP…except that you are again under rating the difficulty of such a venture. I’ll address that part of this and leave how ‘cool’ or ‘Not so cool’ our various adventures were (since thats not what the OP was asking).
Let me put it this way…lets look back in history at the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan as an example. Now, the Soviets at that time were a very powerful military force…arguably as powerful as the US was at the time. Also, the Soviet Union bordered Afghanistan, making logistics support if not easy, at least managable via their rail system.
With all that (plus a measure of support from the Afghan government of the time) the Soviets STILL had a huge problem with fighting this particular ‘teenager’…and in the end they suffered not simply a political defeat (similar to our defeat in Vietnam and perhaps our impending defeat in Iraq) but pretty much a military one. They simply could not sustain the logistics (let alone the military attrition) they were incuring from these ‘teenagers’.
The US on the other hand, even considering the ongoing insurgency in Afghanistan AND Iraq, managed to invade not one but TWO countries at the same time, defeat the main belligerants (the Taliban in one case and Saddam and the Iraqi military in the other) AND thus far maintain a military presence in both countries (again, at the same time)…without incuring a military defeat (and at a cost in casualties much less than an order of magnitude than what the Soviets incured in Afghanistan alone).
No other nation on earth today could do ONE of those invasions…let alone both. Certainly not for so little cost (to our own forces). And this leaves aside supporting those forces both during the initial invasions AND afterward.
It only makes things less impressive to those who don’t understand how the military works. You hand wave off logistics as if it were nothing. Even the US has been stretched to the breaking point in this little adventure. It LOOKS easy (to those who don’t understand) the same way when Tiger swings a club or when a Michael Jordan does whatever basketball players do…they make it LOOKS easy to us poor schlubs who are clueless as to how difficult these things really are.
IOW you are unimpressed because you really have no concept of how hard even conquering a nation like Afghaninstan or Iraq truely is…from thousands of miles away. Ask the British sometime how ‘easy’ these things are (even trying to do something as ‘easy’ as taking back the Falklands).
Well, I define it as ‘something no other nation could do’. Whats your definition?
Here by ‘logistics’ I meant 'getting our stuff over there, and being able to tell it what to do. I’m no expert but I don’t believe we’re the only country capable of shipping our stuff across the globe, or the only country capable of giving orders to an army stationed across the globe.
The issue of how effective we are at operating in another field, once we have our stuff and our orders there, that’s not what I meant by ‘logistics’. Sorry if I’m misusing the term.
It seems related to the OP to me - the OP asked how ‘impressive’ these wars were - what do you think that means?
I’m’a thinking we didn’t fight Saddam until after we’d routed the Taliban. I could be wrong, though. Y’see, I consider the invasion, suppression of the enemy force and government, and establishing occupation over the country to be the “war”. The stuff after that is the “occupation”. This is sort of in line with the OP, I think: “referring more to the quickness in which we toppled their governments, and dissolved their armies.”
So, the wars were not simultaneous, and from way back here, each seemed to be won pretty handily. More handily in Afghanistan than Iraq, but handily nonetheless. Then of course we gradually began getting bogged down in the ‘occupation’ part for both countries, and that is stretching us thin. That’s a whole 'nother matter entirely, though.
I don’t know what the USSR did wrong in Afghanistan. My guess is they messed up their occupation too. That would seem to be the hard part, apparently.
I’m sure it’s expensive to ship all our stuff over there. That’s not quite the same as ‘difficult’, or ‘impressive’ (unless you want to talk about impressive wastes of money, maybe.)
Y’see, I factor in the abilities of the relative parties in gauging the ‘impressiveness’ of their actions. The US is readily able to transport their stuff, so that’s not so impressive to me. (Now, if Iraq had moved a similar amount of materiel onto our shores, that would have been impressive.) After that we’re back to the ‘marine with body armor beating the crap out of a teenager’ scenaro. Not impressive. Not even if nobody else can do it.
‘Something that impresses me.’ A subjective definition to be sure, but it’s not like this question came with an included standard of measurement.
Hmmm, do you have a cite for this? I do tend to believe that most US soldiers in Iraq have tried to obey the laws of war, and that abuses such as those in the Abu Ghraib prison, the alleged killings in Haditha, and the alleged rape-murders in Mahmoudiya (both the latter currently under investigation) weren’t typical of most soldiers’ behavior. But I haven’t seen any evidence either that we have a policy of acting “in the most humane way possible” or that our lack of success in stabilizing Iraq is due to insufficient brutality.
Impressive but not unexpected. The United States had tremendous advantages going in. It’s not surprising that the Iraqi army whithered almost immediately under an attack by an overwhelmingly superior force. Pretty much the same thing happened in Gulf War I.
Of course, war isn’t an end unto itself. The true measure of victory isn’t whose army prevails on the battlefield, but who attains their strategic goals when it’s all over. The war in Iraq has been a victory for Iran and a defeat for pretty much everyone else.
‘Far from done’, huh?
Since the Taliban are back in large chunks of Afghanistan, heroin production is at record levels and Bin Laden is still at large, what would count as ‘victory’ for you?
As for Iraq, more US casualties than on 9/11, no sign of WMD’s and a civil war awaiting US withdrawal: - what would count as ‘victory’ for you?
You could compare the military budget of the US and Afghanistan to get some idea of how impressive that victory was. :smack:
You’re certainly not the ‘best-led’ Armed Forces. George Bush is certainly no Hannibal. :eek:
But are you seriously comparing the US conquering Afghanistan and Iraq with:
I agree…not unexpected, still impressive. Some folks in this thread seem to think that bringing that ‘overwhelmingly superior force’ to bear thousands of miles from our own shores (and our own logistics heads) is a walk in the park. The point I was trying (unsuccessfully it seems) to make is that it LOOKS easy…just like a professional athlete makes things look easy. Or like Stephen Hawkings makes cosmology look easy.
Again, I agree…but that wasn’t really the point of the OP (at least, not as I read it).
What does this have to do with how impressive or unimpressive the original military OP was? The Roman empire no longer exists…its been swept away. Same with the British empire. Does that make them less impressive? Yes, the Taliban have made a come back…however, they haven’t retaken the country by any means. Yes, heroin is being produced in Afghanistan…and the sky is blue. I don’t think capturing Bin Laden or not capturing him (or killing him) has much to do with victory myself.
All this is beside the point…because its not what the OP was ASKING. The OP was asking about the initial military campaigns…not the aftermath. If the OP had asked “How impressive was America’s invasion of Iraq wrt how things have turned out today” then you’d be right. Same if s/he had asked the same thing about Afghanistan and how things have progressed to date. But that isn’t what the OP asked.
This is simply a stupid comparison IMHO. What difference does the comparative budget make? The British during the revolutionary war had probably a GREATER disparity in military budget between them and the American revolutionaries…and still managed to not win. The reason? Because we were closer to where the fighting was than they were…which has a tendency to even the score considerably. Ask the Vietnamese if relative budget makes that much of a difference…or the Afghani’s during the Soviet invasion. Or the Russians when Napoleon invaded.
This is barely worth a :rolleyes: …though on the plus side you probably scored major points with Red on it.
Comparing apples to oranges, but ok…I’m game:
Defeated by the Germans (who I might point out had a smaller military budget ) at the Teutoburg Forest. Also, I’m wondering who you feel they faced that were even in their league militarily.
(BTW, logistically Rome, as well as most of the rest of the examples you listed, pretty much ‘lived off the land’ when on campaign)
Very impressive example. I’ll concede that their military exploits topped those of the US invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, though not for their invasion of Asia. More impressive (to me) was their conquest of Russia.
However, they failed a similar technical test of arms in their invasion of Japan a bit later…and at THAT time the Mongol empire’s military budget (which seems important to you) was several orders of magnitude more than the Japanese. They were also much more technologically advanced (I guess I could argue that they were actually more technologically advanced in military terms than the Chinese, Koreans and certainly the Russians too, in terms of both strategy and tactics…certainly in terms of training and motivation. Though one of the historian types like Tamelane will probably be by to spank me on the point :)).
And yet he failed in a similar test when attempting to invade Russia…again, even though the French empire at the time had a military budget (as well as strategic and tactical superiority) several orders of magnitude above the lowly Russian’s.
Defeated by a bunch of yokals and farmers lead by some wide eyed aristocrats across the big pond…in spite of the fact that (once again) their military budget (as well as their technological, tactical and strategic superiority) was vastly superior to the paltry sum the colonial types had.
The examples you give however are comparing apples to oranges, since you broadly give out empires and then attempt to compare them to military campaigns (or wars if you like). Besides which, this isn’t a contest. The OP didn’t ASK if, say, the American campaign in Afghanistan or the invasion of Iraq are comparable to, say, the Punic War’s, or Austerlitz…or even the Golden Horde’s invasion of Russia or the British conquest of India. S/he only asked if they were IMPRESSIVE (the OP ALSO didn’t ask about the long term ramifications or effects…though I note with no little irony how several people jumped on that and pretty much ignored what the OP was actually ASKING).
They WERE impressive from a purely military perspective. No other nation on earth today could wage such a war, so rapidly, with such support. None. THAT is impressive. The fact that our follow through in Afghanistan sucked donkey dick is beside the point that the INITIAL operation was solid…even brilliant. The fact that we should never have gone into Iraq at all is beside the point that the invasion was flawless and damned impressive…IMHO.
Yes, we have the best conventional forces that have ever existed on the planet, but not because of what occured during the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. We have the best forces because of training, logistics, and sheer technological superiority. When one side has planes and tanks that can take out 50 or more of the other’s sides equivalent units no problem, well, it’s no mystery who’s going to win.
As others have echoed, it’s not quite so simple though.
A conventional army is a tool suited for specific purposes and is ineffective in certain situations. Our military has no equal at 1) beating other conventional forces 2) conquering countries 3) holding and defending territory against other nation states and 4) bombing targets.
When one tries to use one tool to do another tool’s job, or uses a tool improperly, bad things happen. It’s important to recognize this.
However, even fighting another technologically advanced nation in a purely conventional war, our military would have several weaknesses if the situation was serious enough: 1) anti-satellite weapons would knock out several of our advantages, effectively gouging our eyes out. 2) computer attacks and other sophisticated electronic attacks/epsionage could potentially cripple us. 3) assuming we’re fighting a lot closer to them than us – long, vulnerable supply lines would be a tempting target.
Hopefully, we’ll never have to figure some of these things out by real world experience…
But does that make the victory in Iraq any less impressive?
I think the sports analogy is sound. “If Michael Jordan wasn’t so smart, strong, agile and gifted, he wouldn’t have been so good.” Well, OK, thanks for the clarification on that. But he was all those things in one package. But just be can identify why he was great, doesn’t make him any less so? No other military in the world could fight in two countries, one the size of California, 6,000 miles from home, sustain the troops, fight and win. How that’s not universally viewed as impressive, at least on this site, is beyond me.
But does that make the victory in Iraq any less impressive?
I think the sports analogy is sound. “If Michael Jordan wasn’t so smart, strong, agile and gifted, he wouldn’t have been so good.” Well, OK, thanks for the clarification on that. But he was all those things in one package. But just be can identify why he was great, doesn’t make him any less so? No other military in the world could fight in two countries, one the size of California, 6,000 miles from home, sustain the troops, fight and win. How that’s not universally viewed as impressive, at least on this site, is beyond me.
) at the Teutoburg Forest. Also, I’m wondering who you feel they faced that were even in their league militarily.