Why can't the US win any wars anymore?

Great Debates
61

One microcosm case of when politicians did in fact contradict-themselves into defeat was Mogadishu in 1993. Back then, the danger to U.S. troops was very obvious, and the need for protective armor and gunships was urgent. But Secretary of Defense Les Aspin refused to grant the request for such armor and gunships because of a political agenda that said “We need to project the image that we’re drawing down U.S. forces in Somalia even as the need for military stuff has actually increased.” That internal-self-contradictory stance cost 18 American lives and 75 wounded a short time later.

Had Aspin behaved consistently with reality and grasped that, you know, the fact that US troops actually need help trumps the political need to pretend otherwise, the armor and gunships might have saved all the lives.

62

I would disagree. Gulf War I (the 1991 one) was a smashing success. Even Operation Allied Force in 1999 was quite successful; no American deaths (the only death-free war in U.S. history) and the many thousands of NATO sorties ended up breaking Slobodan Milosevic.

And if we divide the ill-advised second Iraq war into two “wars”: the invasion itself vs. the counterinsurgency, the 2003 invasion was a smashing success. it’s the second phase (counterinsurgency) that was a quagmire.

63

Yep. An awful lot of folks prefer the Thornton Melon school of thought, though. Let’s go to the tape:

64

We kicked the Iraqi Army’s ass in Gulf War I. We kicked the Iraqi Army’s ass in Gulf War II.

We have not succeeded in Iraq. We have not won. Same goes for Afghanistan.

We kicked the shit out of the British at Yorktown, the world order changed. We won.

65

I think your definition of winning is not correct. You’re defining winning a war in a narrow context that doesn’t always make sense. You seem to have a simplistic view that the only thing that constitutes a victory is something like Nazi Germany’s defeat in WWII, in which the government of that country is removed and replaced by a government to the liking of the victor. In fact most wars historically did not end that way, if you look at the 500 odd years of warfare in Europe between 1300 and 1800, most of those wars did not involve regime change of the losing power. Sometimes wars are fought for specific pieces of land, with no greater designs. Sometimes wars are fought over economic or trade disputes, or things of that nature. The Persian Gulf War or Gulf War I was fought as an international UN action to assert a UN principle of being opposed to wars of territorial conquest. The stated goal of the UN resolution was to remove Saddam Hussein’s military from its occupation of Kuwait, and to reduce Saddam’s ability to wage aggressive war on his neighbors. There is no definition by which those things did not occur.

You’re saying a war can’t be won unless it’s a “total victory”, which misunderstands that not all wars are Total Wars. By your definition we also lost the American Revolution, since we didn’t invade Great Britain and remove George III from power. Silly.

66

I’m not sure your educational background, but if you’re a product of the American education system, I’d say one thing our basic history often gives a false impression of is what warfare really looks like in general. American history typically covers the few large, decisive wars that the United States has been in and won. Conflicts like our wars in the Middle East in the last 30 years don’t seem to match that definition and it confuses people.

However those big decisive wars are actually the exception to the norm. The U.S. had a long history of being isolated from major powers, and a specific policy of not being entangled in their affairs, which allowed us to avoid many small scale conflicts, and even allowed us to forego having much of a standing military at all during peacetime until after WWII.

But had you been raised in France of Germany, countries defined by something like a thousand years of almost nonstop small scale wars, punctuated by several famous very large wars, you might have a different understanding. Most wars do not end in complete defeat and total annihilation of the enemy.

67

WWII was a victory in Western Europe. Eastern Europe was a completely different story. Robust resistance to Stalin continued for many years in several countries who foolishly believed the rhetoric by Truman and the allies that they supported self-determination, meaning that they would support it ideologically and militarily. The latter was not forthcoming and all those small countries like the Baltics fell one by one to Soviet rule. A true victory for the U.S. (and allies) would have been one in which the U.S. pushed back against Stalin and cleaned up that mess. But we as a country had moved on to new prosperity and Elvis.

68

Russia had a hell of a lot more troops in Europe at the end of WWII. One of the first things the USA did was to send guys home.

69

The short answer involves two points.

The first is that the military can only “win” a war if it is a war that has a defined end point. The second is that the military can only win military goals.

The US has won every war in recent history in which the nature of victory had a definite end point, and the goal has been military.

The problem is that since WWII the longest and most high profile campaigns in which the US armed forces have been involved have either had no defined end point (but rather concerned ongoing containment), or has ultimate goals that were political not military, or both.

70

The U.S. wins wars that have high initial rewards for its aggression and low maintenance costs. No different than any empire/hegemon.

71

There was no need for Gulf War II.

72

Vietnam also handily crushed the Khmer Rouge, which largely prompted the Chinese invasion in the first place. Though drawing plenty of international condemnation at the time, the Vietnamese were kinda the aggrieved party and they ended up taking out one of the nastiest regimes in world history. No saints they, but I can’t look at that Vietnamese invasion too negatively.

73

Vietnams invasion of Cambodia in the 70s. The Tanzania invasion of Uganda. US invasion of Haiti.

I wonder if part of the issue is just that so many wars lately have been power struggles between proxy powers. Either the US vs communist nations (like China & the USSR), or between Sunni and Shia nations, etc. So each side has a lot of training, weapons, funding and intelligence provided by far more powerful nations.

I was watching Ken Burn’s vietnam documentary recently and didn’t know how quickly the south vietnam fell because the west pulled funding from them, but the North still had support from the USSR and China.

74

I think a lot of it goes back to the nature of the belligerents and what a loss looks like for the losing side. There was like a spell being broken in both Germany and Japan when their WWII era governments surrendered. I’m not nearly as well informed on the Japanese side, but I’ve heard it likened almost to a death of a culture. People openly wondered how the Emperor could have surrendered, and how surrender was not inferior to simply fighting to the death. But the culture of obedience to the Emperor, especially in the military, meant the vast majority of Japanese soldiers would not consider continuing to fight against his wishes–note there is a famous coup attempt that was attempted late in the war after the atomic bombings, to “secure” the Emperor and make sure the war effort continued. But aside from that of the millions of Imperial Japanese forces virtually all of them laid down their weapons and went home.

One of the great, perhaps the greatest spirits of national militarism lost its heart over night, and the effects continue to this day in Japanese society.

In Germany, German practicality kicked in pretty quickly, recognizing that the Nazi Party was done for and never coming back, the vast majority of ordinary Germans main concern was “okay how do we get our country fixed and back to running”, it was basically a giant heap of burning rubble, and much work needed to be done. These attitudes were very conducive to being done with war.

In wars like Afghanistan and Iraq, the target of U.S. military force (the Taliban in Afghanistan and the Saddam Ba’athists in Iraq) were just the top dogs in a complicated system in which lots of groups below them hated each other and wanted to kill each other. With the Taliban significantly weakened from the days when it controlled 90% of the country, and Saddam and the Ba’athists completely destroyed, all those groups that hated the fuck out of each other decided it was time to start killing each other ASAP while the time was ripe. It’s just a very different cultural situation than in Japan or Germany.

It helps that Japan and Germany are and were cohesive nation states. Iraq and Afghanistan never have been. Afghanistan is a historical region, but not a “nation.” No ethnic group calls its Afghan or Afghani, the country is 42% Pashtun and 27% Tajik, and then the remainder is made up of various smaller ethnicities. Even more, these groups are very tribal, so just saying “Pashtun” only has certain connotations. There are plenty of Pashtun tribes that don’t get along with each other, for example.

Iraq is less racially plural–being overwhelming Arab aside from the Kurdish region in the north, and the Turkish population also in the North, but Iraq is a religiously divided country. There have been serious issues with its Shia and Sunni populations being willing to live in a country where the other “side” has political power, which is not a good recipe for a viable country. The fact that powerful Sunni and Shia neighbors funnel money to the respective sides doesn’t help. It’s honestly a miracle Iraq isn’t in open civil war right now to be honest, and that may just be due to general war fatigue after a solid 12-14 years of almost endless fighting culminating in the multi-year ISIS battles.

75

All wars in which one power has greater strength and is in close proximity to the other, so logistics aren’t as much of an issue. Both Vietnam and Tanzania were taking on loathsome regimes which actually initiated hostilities, so there was probably strong internal support for prosecuting these wars in their direct national security interests (not that popular support was requested or particularly needed)

76

It still comes back to the question “What is victory?” in Vietnam. And that’s a question that is rightly in the sphere of the politicians, not in the military’s. The politicians should be the ones defining what the nation’s point in fighting somewhere is, and what the goals that they’re trying to achieve by fighting are. And both of these should be very well defined and clear in ways that can be measured/determined by militaries.

Both Gulf Wars were resounding victories, in the sense of the military achieved exactly what they were asked to do in both cases- kick Hussein out of Kuwait, and defeat the Iraqi military during the invasion. The problem came in after the actual war itself, with the US seemingly caught flat-footed by the reality of having to occupy the nation once we’d conquered it. Think about it this way- we defeated the Japanese pretty convincingly in WWII, and the subsequent occupation went well. In the 2nd Gulf War, we defeated the Iraqi Army, but the subsequent occupation and ethnic insurgencies did not go well. Two different things really.

77

Victory is simple: did the war achieve what we wanted it to? If the answer is absolutely yes, then it’s a win. If it’s absolutely no, then we lost. Many times, it’s complicated.

In the case of Afghanistan, for instance, we did kill OBL, and we sent a clear message that the Taliban can’t use their territory as a staging ground for terrorist attacks. The Taliban outlasted us, true, but they did pay a heavy price for messing with the U.S. They were out of power for 20 years. They lost of lot of blood. They surely know that next time we could just nuke the country or firebomb it if necessary. We won’t be hindered by shit like overfly permissions from Pakistan. So yeah, our little nation-building experiment failed, but the Taliban would be fools not to get the message that it’s unwise to piss us off.

78

By the time the US killed OBL, they had been in Afghanistan for around a decade. The US had added nation building to their list of reasons for being there (so the US did not immediately withdraw). The war would have gone a lot better if OBL had been found, fixed, and finished right away. Second best would be not expanding reasons for war, so the moment OBL was dead, the US could declare “mission accomplished” and get out there rather than trying a generations-long nation-building project.

79

Here’s the reason why we didn’t just bomb and declare “mission accomplished.”

Afghanistan Oil Pipeline - Wikipedia.

We’ve done business with the Taliban before; we’ll probably do it again.

80

Nukes changed everything. Before that, countries (including the US) marshalled all of their strength to fight against another country and decided how far they could go to defeat their enemy and made an objective. If you completed the objective, you “won” the war.

Today, with nukes, we can destroy the whole planet so we have to politically decide how much force we can use and still be considered humane and decent. I mean, militarily, we could level Afghanistan, kill everyone there who think of giving us a slight problem, and build McMansions for white rich people.

But we don’t dream of doing that, nor should we. Our enemies know that as well and therefore know that they can “beat” us in a war of attrition. The advancing technology has made the old way of thinking obsolete.