So what happens when two equally modern and roughly equal forces try to battle each other? If they blast the hell out of each other, how do you replace the losses? My point about attrition was that today our militaries are geared around relatively small numbers of extremely expensive weapons that could not be swiftly or easily replaced.
[QUOTE=Lumpy]
So what happens when two equally modern and roughly equal forces try to battle each other?
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All things being equal? Equal hardware, equal communications, equal numbers? It would come down to training and tactical/strategic doctrine in that case, and would probably be a blood bath, no matter who ‘won’. Of course, this situation is completely unrealistic, since afaik there is no real parity between nations that would have even a small chance of a military confrontation. In most cases the countries don’t have the logistics to support external operations, so they couldn’t really get at each other. They don’t have parity in communications. Or parity in hardware. Or parity in troop quality and training.
They wouldn’t. Assuming that both countries military strength is categorically equal, and that they could logistically support the war, then it would be a battle to the death, over before either side could re-enforce. So, it would be down to the losing side throwing in the towel or using asymmetric warfare tactics to keep going. Both sides infrastructure would be shredded, however, so there is no way they could substantially re-enforce (ETA: by which I mean rebuild capital combat assets at a rate to keep up with losses, or even keep up with munitions expenditures substantially past the initial stockpiles) in the time frame of a war.
Even the US has had problems with this in Iraq and Afghanistan in replacing even our munitions expenditures, and we are so far outside of anyone else’s league that it’s not in the same universe. Plus, our infrastructure hasn’t had the crap blown out of it by an enemy capable of hitting us as hard as we hit them.
Yep…they are. Though ‘small number’ is a relative term if you look at the US military. But yeah…our military is definitely a quality over quantity affair, and if we ever went toe to toe with someone of equal capacity then it would be ugly…and there would be no way that either side could replace their losses if those losses were as high as I think they would be. So, it would be a matter of which side collapsed first.
Training up a bunch of low quality forces with less capable weapons would just be a way to get a lot of folks killed really quickly to limited or no ends, however, so I don’t see either high tech combatant going that route, regardless.
-XT
One of the reasons why we do not “win” wars is that we are not ruthless enough. For example, had we decided in Vietnam, that “victory” was worth 5 million lives, we could have won. Our reluctance to commit mass slaughter made it impossible to win.
Which is why we will lose all of these recent wars that we have (unwisely, IMHO, chosen to start)…because we lack the will to do what it takes to win. having already revealed our hand to the enemy (Afghanistan) we face certain defeat, because the enemy knows that they can lay low and wait for us to tire of the mess.
Had we decided (at the outset) that we would willingly kill large numbers of people, we would have won. Would it have earned us the (rightful) condemnation of the world? Yes
Would it result in victory-Yes
Would it be worth it? Who knows.
No it wouldn’t, since we never had much of a plan there to be victorious at. No amount of slaughter will get you to a goal you haven’t even specified.
You are also ignoring the problem that when the enemy is the people who live there, they are pretty much guaranteed to outwait us unless we commit outright genocide. The British occupied people for centuries and were quite willing to be brutal; they still rose up and grabbed for independence after all that time.
[QUOTE=Der Trihs]
No it wouldn’t, since we never had much of a plan there to be victorious at. No amount of slaughter will get you to a goal you haven’t even specified.
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Agreed. Senseless slaughter doesn’t bring about victory, it merely further tarnishes the country that engages in it. We didn’t lose because we were not ruthless enough, we lost because we had no goal towards which we were working (together) for victory. The people were not fully behind the war even at the beginning, and the leaders had no idea of what they wanted to do or where they wanted to lead, and the military were no better. No one could tell their ass from a bagel, or find it with both hands and a radar guidance system.
-XT
The first link attempts to explain the reason behind the lower mortality rates. As lethality has gone up battlefield density has gone down. Think of Greek Hoplites practically arm-in-arm compared to 18th-century musket lines compared to today’s small teams. Modern armies have reacted to technology and have lowered their mortality.
The total Allied casualties for the first day of D-Day were roughly 10% (wounded, KIA, and captured). That was a full day of total war.
Be fair. We could have ‘won’ Iraq in the classic sense, if we had gone in with the 400,000 troops that were deemed necessary by the Joint Chiefs. But no, like some deranged batchall, Rumsfeld insisted it could be won with 100,000 men. Which led to a force structure that could destroy the opposing army, but not occupy and rebuild the country. It’s documented that the Bush (II) Administration’s official stance was that the Iraqis would greet their liberators with open arms and all would be well.
History has suggested they were overly optimistic.
So advancing military technologies did not provide as decisive an advantage as Rumsfeld et. al. felt they would?
I’m not convinced that any technology that doesn’t fit Clarke’s third law* will make modern wars decisively winnable. There are simply too many interested “non-combatants” in most modern military theatres to to make anything short of genocide or mind control truly effective.
*Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
The Iran-Iraq war being perhaps the best recent example.
Yes, but the additional factor is that battles have grown more protracted. Mortality for any given day of battle is lower … but battles last many more days.
Yes, but D-Day was not a single decisive battle like Waterloo; it was followed by the Normandy Campaign, etc. While 10% of those committed were casualties on the first day, the “battle” of the Normandy Campaign lasted almost two months.
On the German side at least, casualties were severe - around 1/3 of the total forces committed. Admittedly this was stretched out over almost two months, rather than concentrated in a single day of battle … but from the soldier’s POV, what matters is their chance of surviving the battle.
In many ways, the ordeal of the modern soldier is rendered worse. Battles have grown longer. Instead of having to maintain one’s courage through a single afternoon of combat, now they are expected to do so for months on end; and while one can run away (in theory) if one’s courage breaks in a premodern battle, it is almost impossible to (say) run away from Normandy.
Nothing to do with technology. Rummy felt that the Iraqis really wanted to be free from their terrible dictator and a sustainable and free nation would spontaneously form.
I’m not shitting you. That’s what, as near as I can tell, he believed. Nation-building after a war? Not needed. See Cobra II, the book, for further exhaustive detail.
I don’t understand that kind of magical thinking.
The technological advantage of destroying the other army? Worked great. Letting all the soldiers go home without jobs? Not so good, really.
Aside from the initial invasions, are Iraq and Afghanistan ‘wars’ in the same sense that Vietnam, Korea, WWII, etc were?
As for the OP, I think the answer is no because people will change the definition of ‘war’ and ‘decisive victory’. The US used to have wars where thousands of soldiers would be killed in a single battle. Now we view thousands of soldiers being killed over seven years to be outrageous. I think that shift is primarily because the US has developed such overwhelming force, largely due to technology, that the types of wars previously done are almost impossible to imagine these days. So our definition of ‘war’ has shifted from storming the beaches of Normandy to what amounts to policing operations. Our definition of ‘decisive victory’ has shifted from defeating an enemies military to making sure no one in an entire country will try even a suicidal attack on US troops.
Or to put it another way, when Germany curbstomped France in WWII, it was considered a decisive victory. Sure, there were french resistance running around, but even so Germany had won a decisive victory. When the US curbstomped Iraq in 2003, we mocked ‘mission accomplished’ because there were still resistance fighters running around Iraq.
Which isn’t a bad thing actually, I’m not trashing people opposed to our actions in Iraq. Just saying, there’s a huge difference between a ‘war’ and a ‘decisive victory’ fifty or sixty years ago and today.
Agreed…there is no way to "win’ ars like Afghanistan. For one thing, Afghanistan is not a nation (in the Western sense). It is a collection of tribes, and never was under any central authority (even in the days of King Zahir shah). The king never ruled anything 100 miles beyond Kabul.
So why don’t we just admit this and stop pouring money and lives down a rathole?
Although not inacurrate from a general standpoint, these ideas were seen operating a bit differently in Vietnam after the U.S. got involved. The outcome was more due to a lack of political will in the U.S. i.e. the “lack” of a willingness to fight. The North was more in the mode of keeping the pressure on just enough to wait it out and let the U.S. effort self destruct on it’s own, rather than any desperate last ditch efforts.
That would be a stretch if you can call nation building a military aim. Al-Queida has shown recent resurgence in Iraq portending a new chapter of violence yet to come after the Americans propping up the new regime there are gone.
But unfortunately those casualties are surviving horrific injuries due to that care creating a new generation of disabled veterans like has never been seen before.
This is a gross misconception. We have the cities, some big military bases and claim to control some small percentage of the countryside. The only things keeping us in that fight are things the Soviets lacked back in the 80s: Superior ISR and airpower. You might consider watching the documentary Restrepo by Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington.
I would characterize our reluctance to commit more of our own soldiers to be slaughtered in Vietnam as the driving force (or lack thereof) in that conflict.
In rephrasing this notion again, I would say we lack the will to die. Modern precision-guided weapons of all shapes and sizes give us the ability to take out militarily significant targets at will with little to no collateral damage. What we don’t have is the ability to keep the American public in the fight long enough to clean up our own mess we made.
I’ll lay the blame for that at partisan politics’ door. :mad:
[QUOTE=Nadir]
That would be a stretch if you can call nation building a military aim
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Nation building is a political goal or aim, not a military one.
Why do you think this is an important point? Put it this way, in WWI the allies did or did not defeat Germany militarily? If yes, then how do you reconcile that with the fact that less than 20 years later the Germans were back in the conquest game? Did Nazi Germany defeat France militarily or not? If yes, then how do you reconcile that with the fact that less than a decade later Nazi Germany had been defeated and France was back in the hands of the French?
Military victory does not equate to political victory, and military victory is transitory…it just about never lasts forever. That’s why ultimate victory needs political and diplomatic aspects to be lasting at all. Iraq may very well fall to internal strife and external groups like AQ. None of that has anything at all to do with the fact that the US decisively militarily defeated them in both Gulf Wars.
-XT
Even when you are using the military to do it? May we then just just say small military goals supporting the big ultimate political objective? They are not as inseperable as you seem to think.
It may or may not. Your statement is absolutely wrong in “just about” every sense of the word, depending on the specific conflict. The American revolution stands contrary to that notion, current hysterical political rants aside, as does the American Civil War, despite what some modern day secessionists may believe. More recently, Operation Just cause in Panama offers another example where military and political objectives were necessarily tightly integrated and successful to this day.
We just normally hope war is the last resort to diplomatic negotiations where political interests involving national security are concerned.
Uh, maybe because it flatly refutes your statement about successful “military aims?”
Really? Could you elaborate why you think so?
-XT
Maybe more to the point you could explain how ongoing suicide bombings and roadside IED detonations fits the bill for “military aims have all been successful?”
[QUOTE=Nadir]
Even when you are using the military to do it?
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Of course. Unless you believe that everything can be achieved with mere military force. Historically, I can’t see what you could base that on, to be honest.
Well, yeah. Military force is an extension of political and diplomatic power.
One is an extension of the other.
You would have to demonstrate this…let’s see how you did.
Leaving aside whatever you think ‘current hysterical political rants’ even means (I have no idea what you are taking about), how does the American Revolution contradict my statement that ‘Military victory does not equate to political victory, and military victory is transitory…it just about never lasts forever’. The reason that the US won the Revolutionary war and was able to go on to establish a viable sovereign state is because of a political compromise with the British that ended the war. Even with US military victories during the RW the British could have continued to fight, and in fact had the power to dominate the US had they so chosen. It was diplomacy and political actions that lead to lasting ‘victory’ or a peaceful resolution…not transitory military victories.
Again, leaving aside whatever the hell you mean by the second half, the first half doesn’t demonstrate that pure military victory leads to peace. It was the military victories coupled with diplomacy and political power that lead to a re-integration of the South with the North…not pure military victory. Had the North chosen to ignore all diplomacy and political power and simply attempt to dominate the South with pure military power it would have lead to continued strife and conflict and possibly a second rebellion down the road.
You seem to be all over the board here, so maybe I’m misunderstanding whatever point you are trying to raise. Military objectives are set by and constrained by political and diplomatic objectives. They are subordinate to them in the end, no matter how militant the country engaging in military action. Even the Mongols didn’t attempt to destroy everyone and dominate solely through military action. They used the terror of their military to force political and diplomatic compliance in their enemies.
Well, yeah. That’s always the hope, and not that it’s the first club in the politicians and diplomats bag of tricks.
-XT