Well, “easy” in terms of the casualties taken by the US compared to other main combatants
I’m going to try to treat the first question briefly as I can:
Strength is not enough to win long term occupations whose goals are the remaking of an occupied society in the occupiers’ image. This isn’t a unique thing to the United States. This is not to say that such occupations cannot be won, in many ways we did just that in Germany and Japan. But you need more than just brute strength. If the Japanese and the Germans had been willing to literally continue to see their countries persist as hell holes, fighting never ending insurgencies, we likely would not have left those countries waving the rah rah flag either. It wasn’t just our strength that made our victory in Germany so complete–it was a German agreement that peace and submission was the right path for them.
Now to treat the other things you’ve said in this thread, I think you frankly have some ahistorical views:
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Canada “kicked our asses in the War of 1812.” This isn’t really accurate, most of our military losses in the War of 1812 were against deployed British regulars. Canadian militia did okay early on in skirmishes in the North, but were doing very poorly by 1815. The British regulars and Royal Marines whipped our ass in the Chesapeake campaign, but that entire force was like a few thousand men. It was not an army of conquest, it kept moving on and left of its own accord. Now in the 19th century both countries’ populations resoundingly believed they had won the war in dominating fashion. In America it was celebrated as “confirmation of the war of Independence” because we had stood toe to toe with the British again and come out without any serious losses. For Canadians, it was seen as repelling an attempted American invasion of conquest. Both arguments have some conflicts with actual reality. In America over the years the war became forgotten because it was actually not all that important historically, and is overshadowed by more consequential wars like the Mexican-American and Civil War. In Canada it has continued to have more mystique. The reality is it was mostly a number of skirmishes and an ultimate return to the status quo ante. The British burning of the White House and the American burning of the Canadian provincial parliament building at York probably suggested to the smarter and more insightful parties on both sides of the border that future wars were unwise.
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We basically rescued South Korea from certain annihilation. I am not a fan at all of Douglas MacArthur the man, but his scheme for pushing the North Koreans back was nothing short of mastery, and the odds we were facing in the early days of the war, to end up with an independent, democratic South Korea ( the democratic part took decades) can be seen as nothing other than a success. It was never formal American policy to end the existence of North Korea. There’s a reason Truman fired MacArthur, he exceeded his orders in marching to the Yalu river and provoking the Chinese counter attack (an attack that cost many Americans their lives.) Given the war started as a UN action to protect the independence of South Korea, I do think this war was a victory. We didn’t start this war, nor did we go in with a formal goal of conquering North Korea. Wars under UN mandate don’t work that way, it actually is against the international legal system to just conquer another country and disestablish it. Our UN mandate was to end North Korean hostilities against South Korea. It was also to continue to protect South Korea from future invasion, technically that part of the UN resolution is still in effect I believe.
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Likewise the first Gulf War was under a UN mandate to end the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait. We additionally had the goal of preventing future Iraqi aggression. We had massive success on both counts. Kuwait was liberated and Iraq’s army was reduced to a force of almost zero consequence, we also secured an ongoing right to do flights over Iraq, to inspect Iraq for weapons of mass destruction etc. Iraq lost this war badly, and the UN coalition won it decisively. “Regime change” was a war hawk thing maybe talked about by some parties internally, but Bush went to the UN to get a resolution to liberate Kuwait and to create conditions such that Saddam couldn’t invade any of its neighbors again. I see virtually no reading of history in which this wasn’t the outcome, further it was achieved with remarkably few coalition casualties. It was also done with a remarkable degree of respect for international law and with broad support from a huge coalition of countries.
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The second Iraq War was not well considered and cost over a trillion dollars and thousands of lives, and cost the Iraqis even more. But it did achieve its goals–the end of Saddam’s control of Iraq and the installation of a new government ruled by Iraqis. This in fact, occurred. After we left ISIS took control of swathes of Iraq and we went back in and pushed ISIS out of those strongholds. In present day, Iraq has problems, among them ongoing difficulties between Shia and Sunni, and the presence of sectarian militias. Iraq isn’t a picture of perfect harmony, but our goals in this war were achieved.
Afghanistan is a perfect example of mission creep. When we went into that country it was to get Osama bin Laden and establish that harboring terrorists would bring with it consequences. We established the second one in a big way by the end of our first year in Iraq, as we had killed lots of the Taliban’s leadership and many of its members. It’s a good question how our goal became to make Afghanistan a stable, democratic country, but that did eventually become our goal. That is a process we need to think about more carefully in the future. There is evidence we did so with our involvement in Libya and Syria. In both countries we kept our involvement far more limited, without making open ended commitments about the “future” of countries we really have no control over and whose people we have very little in common with.
I’d argue that the US has expanded its sphere of influence for the same reasons that past empires have. I think that as our awareness of human rights has advanced, we’ve made similar advances, but as our country and civilization has grown larger and more complex, we’ve run into the same problems that past empires have had. We’ve set up this global political and economic system, and if we want to be the primary beneficiaries of that system, we have to establish regimes, procedures, rules, and systems that steer the fruits of that system come to us and our closest allies first.
China, meanwhile, represents a clear and direct threat to that system. Whereas in the 1980s, China was just another part of our supply chain, the wealth that the globe has given China in exchange for its cheap labor has made them a rival to be reckoned with. Just as the United States was the rising power of the early 20th Century and European colonial powers were beginning to age, China and the US now occupy similar positions relative to each other. China has more room to grow and it is trying to set up its own economic and political system; the US has sputtered, and it’s about to decline much harder, much faster, I’m afraid, for all of the reasons I’ve outlined so far in this thread. We’re kind like Mike Tyson after 30.
We taught them a lesson in 1918
And they’ve hardly bothered us since then
- Tom Lehrer
Good post, Martin. Yes, I’d forgotten about the first Iraq war - obviously a successful campaign.
Vietnam is complicated because part of why it went down as it did is the actual population of South Vietnam had incredibly low support for the regime that ran the country. There were lots of South Vietnamese who were fighting in allegiance with the North Vietnamese, some were committed communists. Many were simply committed Vietnamese nationalists, who viewed South Vietnam as nothing more than a puppet regime (an idea reinforced by the fact that it had such little legitimacy it wasn’t a functional state without U.S. support) and wanted foreign interlopers off of Vietnamese soil.
That latter part was a very important, and gravely misunderstood element of our involvement in Vietnam, in fact many other countries made that same mistake. China assumed Vietnam would become its happy subserviant Communist buddy client state after the fall of South Vietnam. This did not occur. In fact they were at open war some five years later, and remain on pretty terrible diplomatic terms today. The Vietnamese have a strongly nationalist streak, American war planners and thinkers misunderstood that war as about the spread of communism, and under appreciated how much the Vietnamese people saw it as a war of liberation from Western imperialism.
An addendum: One reason mighty China is probably a tad careful with its actual military inventions is because of that Sino-Vietnamese War. In three weeks (in which they did win strategic victories), the Chinese military had about the same number of deaths as America suffered in 12 years in Vietnam. China knew that an extended campaign in Vietnam would be a blood bath and a massive drain on its resources. It wisely declared victory and left (Vietnam also declared victory.)
well we’ve proven the old adage that "Afghanistan is where empires/world powers go to die " is pretty much still true
I’ve kind of debunked that before–Afghanistan is a lawless region frequently engaged in conflict, but it has had many periods in which it was ruled by foreigners for hundreds of years at a time. In pre-modern times empires often did not have active goals of keeping conquered peoples domestically tranquil–i.e. they didn’t care if tribes in the region fought each other as long as they paid tribute and didn’t fuck with trade routes. Its frequent changing of hands was often more about it being a lawless border region between surrounding empires more than it was about its people being particularly difficult to conquer.
I think the big problem with Vietnam is that the United States didn’t know what the hell it as doing. US leadership was divided and fundamentally misunderstood the Vietnamese people, their leaders, and the political motivations for the fighting. It’s tough to set realistic goals for victory when you fundamentally don’t understand the situation you’re in. I feel Afghanistan had similar problems. Expecting to build a nation there was unrealistic and demonstrated a fundamental lack of understanding of the people of Afghanistan by US leaders.
It’s fairly easy to conquer and difficult to maintain under a single national umbrella for the very same reason: it’s tribal. The fact that they are tribal made it pretty easy to roll the Taliban initially, but this also made it very difficult to vanquish them and establish a pro-American regime that would endure. The Soviets had a similar experience in the 1980s. The only reason they folded sooner is they had less money to piss away.
This was meant in jest in reply to @kayakar. Whom I assume was also commenting in jest.
I don’t think in a single one of these we even had a final objective. And Vietnam espcially…the common complaint I’d heard from so many military folks–“The politicians kept us from winning”–was not actually correct. The military had no actual plan for winning that conflict.
I think our Canadian colleagues would appreciate the calligraphy.
It shows the invasion as considered, done with care for detail, with a mind to how it would be perceived in the future.
Rather than be some spur of the moment, high testosterone, low oxygen, “USA USA Fuck Yeah” thing … like a disproportionate proportion since.
As to other points, I do appreciate your well thought out and expressed opposing viewpoints.
I need more time to express why exactly we aren’t the same page.
War is an extension of politics. We can win a war militarily and lose the war because we don’t have a clear political objective, or perhaps we can have a clear political objective but miscalculate the degree of difficulty in achieving it. Moreover, in a democratic society that values governance by consent, there’s an added layer of complexity to deal with. If the people are divided on whether to get involved, that becomes a domestic political problem.
This is why I suspect that in the years ahead, with increased population / resource ratios and scarcity, democracy as we know it will probably be driven to near extinction. That doesn’t necessarily mean that every place on earth is going to be a North Korean gulag, but governments will have to make complex decisions more swiftly, efficiently, and the ruling classes will be less inclined to trust that a pluralistic government to do that.
Blaming political leadership anytime the military comes up short is fairly common in most countries. In Vietnam since so much of the Pentagon’s own deliberations have either been leaked or formally released, we actually know that military brass poorly understood the political realities of Vietnam and were building out a strategy that was built on multiple flawed premises.
There was a sense of bitterness like this associated with Truman/MacArthur/Korea/China over the end of the Korean War, too. MacArthur genuinely felt it was time to engage in a general war with China, which to his mind would have included using nuclear weapons, to basically gut China as a communist power.
This is a situation where someone who is brilliant at winning individual battles (like Inchon) isn’t guaranteed to know best about “grand strategy.” While Truman’s active service in WWI ended with him as the rank of Captain and he reached the rank of Colonel in the officer reserves–he lacked any of the formal experience at large scale strategy or education in military strategy that MacArthur had, but he was far more realistic about what the greater strategic realities would have been had we committed to full war with China. For one it would have required a WWII level call up of men, and MacArthur’s idea of using atomic weaponry to bring China to heel likely would have opened a pandora’s box of misery for the entire world. Truman frankly was right, and Mac was wrong. And while some of Mac’s supporters slurred Truman for the rest of his life, the reality is that was an example of the political leadership correctly snipping the balls of an insubordinate military leader who was angling to commit the United States to grave national disaster.
A common refrain from the “blame the politician” side in Vietnam is that “we won every battle but lost the war.” It is true we did win every significant battle, but it’s wrong that that was the whole story militarily. It’s actually not dissimilar from the American Revolution, while we did have to beat the British in some pitched battles to win our independence, the reality was winning and losing battles wasn’t what decided that war, and it wasn’t what decided the Vietnamese War. Just by keeping armies in the field and being a persistent drain on the British, we were winning by a thousand small cuts even as they frequently swept aside our usually ill-trained militia-packed forces. In Vietnam while we inflicted something like 20 casualties on the Vietnamese for every 1 of ours, had mastery of the skies and seas, and won every large scale battle, we could never get them to stop fighting. Of course the ending of the war was also kind of a bit of staged theater, because we did sign the Paris Peace Accords which technically brought the war to a peaceful conclusion and left South Vietnam intact. But Kissinger and Nixon certainly knew this was political theater, and that South Vietnam would be invaded in short order, which it was.
Excellent summation.
I agree with most of what you are saying.
US Army vs any other Army. The US wins
US Navy vs any other Navy. The US wins
US Air Force vs any other Air Force. The US wins
But we we haven’t won a war since WWII.