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Old 06-23-2016, 11:33 PM
 
93 posts, read 86,266 times
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Or were they all just mentally retarded? Does it really take a rocket scientist to figure out combating a hostile people that hate your guts and will never stop and especially have VASTLY different ways than you do is ALWAYS a no-win scenario? If so, I honestly don't know what's more stupid the wars themselves or the fact such looney tune characters actually are allowed to make such decisions. Surely in both cases anyone that has two brain cells would realize there was no way to "win", not like facing a very centralized enemy like Japan or Germany.
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Old 06-24-2016, 02:19 AM
 
6,438 posts, read 6,893,197 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Garchompa View Post
Or were they all just mentally retarded? Does it really take a rocket scientist to figure out combating a hostile people that hate your guts and will never stop and especially have VASTLY different ways than you do is ALWAYS a no-win scenario? If so, I honestly don't know what's more stupid the wars themselves or the fact such looney tune characters actually are allowed to make such decisions. Surely in both cases anyone that has two brain cells would realize there was no way to "win", not like facing a very centralized enemy like Japan or Germany.
It is possible to win wars against a decentralized enemy. U.S. white settlers defeated the Indians, consisting of about 3000 quarreling tribes. There are similar examples throughout history. We almost won the war in Vietnam before Congress defunded the war and we lost. We came close to winning in Iraq and Afghanistan too, but really had no plan for governing once we achieved a military victory.

By the way, the people of Japan and Germany hated our guts too.
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Old 06-24-2016, 08:29 AM
 
14,993 posts, read 23,822,706 times
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Do politicians and military leaders really think we can win in any conflict? Yes they do. But in a democracy military leaders answer to politicians, politicians answer to the people. Yes we were winning in all three conflicts, but if the will of the people to fight a war protracted war fail, the war itself fails. Winning an "insurgency" type of conflict is no mystery, and it is winnable - it takes time and patience, something that the American people do not have, and it takes will of force to do what it takes to win the war - again something that the American people do not have.

Maybe politicians should take a reality check - long protracted wars simply do not work in a democracy.

Since this will regrettable dive into the "Bush did this" and "Obama did this" debate, maybe it should be moved.
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Old 06-24-2016, 08:54 AM
 
7,577 posts, read 5,303,685 times
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"Did politicians and military leaders REALLY think they could "win" in Vietnam/Iraq/Afghanistan?"

Generally speaking the answer is yes, they did, do and will think that they can win such wars. They just have to do it very quickly and with as little negative consequences as possible. So generally speaking. politicians as a general rule don't understand that these types of wars are unwinnable because they are, see British victory in Burma, the American victory in Bolivia, or Britain's victory in India.
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Old 06-24-2016, 11:56 AM
 
434 posts, read 247,302 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by TheWiseWino View Post
"Did politicians and military leaders REALLY think they could "win" in Vietnam/Iraq/Afghanistan?"

Generally speaking the answer is yes, they did, do and will think that they can win such wars. They just have to do it very quickly and with as little negative consequences as possible. So generally speaking. politicians as a general rule don't understand that these types of wars are unwinnable because they are, see British victory in Burma, the American victory in Bolivia, or Britain's victory in India.
Iraq / Afgan / Vietnam were "winnable". Afgan was going ok until the invasion of Iraq, poor strategy, ineffective diplomacy and under resoursing where major culprits in the current state of affairs.
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Old 06-24-2016, 12:17 PM
 
Location: Oregon, formerly Texas
10,029 posts, read 7,188,252 times
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Sure. Colonial powers defeated insurgencies all the time. That was the default outcome actually.

The question is, how long is the foreign power willing to throw money and lives at the problem?
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Old 06-24-2016, 12:32 PM
 
23,563 posts, read 70,158,065 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Garchompa View Post
Or were they all just mentally retarded? Does it really take a rocket scientist to figure out combating a hostile people that hate your guts and will never stop and especially have VASTLY different ways than you do is ALWAYS a no-win scenario? If so, I honestly don't know what's more stupid the wars themselves or the fact such looney tune characters actually are allowed to make such decisions. Surely in both cases anyone that has two brain cells would realize there was no way to "win", not like facing a very centralized enemy like Japan or Germany.
I'm not sure why you are coming from such an emotional standpoint, especially since a lot of losing sides in wars were fighting from an emotional standpoint. The lumping of the three conflicts together also shows that you might be thinking about them in pretty simplistic terms and doing some stereotyping.

Vietnam, divided into north and south, has a lot of commonality to Korea, also divided into north and south. North Korea wanted/wants to take over South Korea. It hasn't. The battles there established a border. Based upon that experience, why should there have been a thought of "This worked, but this won't"? At issue in south Vietnam was that the existing government there was not liked by many many of the people, and that wasn't taken into serious enough consideration.

Iraq - Powell had grave concerns and ultimately got booted from the Cheney and Rumsfeld frat party. Those two are, in my mind, just flat-out insane. The concept of forcibly removing the despot that holds control over wildly disparate peoples in relative peace is similar to standing at the base of an earthen dam and determining that the landscape would be greener if you just dug a little hole through the dam for the water to come out.

Afghanistan - Actually, the problem there was an error of tactics. There were a couple of highly influential and powerful sufi leaders that were not given sufficient protection and were killed early on. Without them, power structures were fragmented and weak, and internecine fighting was bound to occur, distracting from the greater goal.

Of the three, only Iraq was "unwinnable." Had the corruption of the government in south Vietnam been addressed and the peasants been treated as more than peasants, the war could have turned differently. Had strong internal leaders lived in Afghanistan, it could have contained the Taliban. Remember that the Saudis were strong enough to push them out.
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Old 06-24-2016, 01:12 PM
 
Location: Type 0.73 Kardashev
11,110 posts, read 9,770,079 times
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Once again, the problem here is a failure to comprehend what it means to win a war. Wars are not conflicts between militaries for supremacy. Wars are conflicts between states, meant to achieve political goals, in which military force is but one of the tools used to achieve those objectives.

Vietnam
The immediate goal was to preserve the South Vietnam state as a non-communist entity. But this was only a means to the end of preventing the so-called Domino Effect, which was going to happen if we didn't prevent the communist takeover of South Vietnam - specifically, places like the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand were going to fall to communism. The immediate mission of propping up South Vietnam failed, but the communist sweep of Southeast Asia - the prevention of which the war was predicated upon - did not occur.

Thus, we can come to one of two conclusions. One is that the logic behind the war in the first place was faulty, so the fact that it was not won is irrelevant. The second is that the logic was wrong in the details, but that pouring billions of dollars and wasting ~58,000 American lives in a doomed effort to save South Vietnam nonetheless prevented - for example - Indonesia from becoming communist. This doesn't really make much sense, but it is favored by those who are emotionally vested in the sacrifices made by individuals during the war, so they can perceive those sacrifices as meaningful.

Afghanistan
The goal of the war was to root out al-Qaeda, which had undertaken the 09/11 attacks, and to destroy the local government that was sheltering them. This was accomplished. The 'failure' of all the mission-creep goals that followed is irrelevant. The harrying of al-Qaeda prevented it from launching any large-scale attacks such as those of 09/11. Mission accomplished.

Iraq
This war was predicted on such idiotic nonsense that it was never possible to achieve the immediate goals, which were to seize the alleged 'vast stockpiles of WMD' before Iraq could use them on the United States. Since they never existed in the first place, which the architects of the war have long since conceded, the entire point of the war is moot. In that context, what could it possibly mean to 'win' it?

I suppose you could glom onto the mission-creep fantasies operating therein. That a democracy was going to be set up in Iraq and that the Iraqis were going to embrace democracy. This was far-fetched to begin with. That the other states of the Middle East were going to bear witness to the fruits of Iraqi democracy, and therefore embrace it, this providing much-needed stabilization to Iraq. This reflected an astonishingly foolish and naive understanding of the Middle East.

Essentially, this war was unwinnable because the immediate objectives were not possible to achieve (you can't locate and seize what does not even exist) or extremely implausible (the absurd 'tidal wave of freedom will wash over the Middle East' scenario) - but you can't tell that to the people who will insist that if we just did it better (the usual translation herein is that we needed to drop more bombs, kill more people, and just generally be more hard-assed so they'd know who was boss and thus do what we told them to do - more naivete).

To sum up, wars are fought with political objectives. In Vietnam, those objectives were either unnecessary or accidentally achieved anyway. In Afghanistan, those objectives were achieved to a greater degree than with most wars. In Iraq, the objectives were so illogical that we never could have achieved them.
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Old 06-24-2016, 02:33 PM
 
7,577 posts, read 5,303,685 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Glokta View Post
Iraq / Afgan / Vietnam were "winnable". Afgan was going ok until the invasion of Iraq, poor strategy, ineffective diplomacy and under resoursing where major culprits in the current state of affairs.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Unsettomati View Post
Once again, the problem here is a failure to comprehend what it means to win a war. Wars are not conflicts between militaries for supremacy. Wars are conflicts between states, meant to achieve political goals, in which military force is but one of the tools used to achieve those objectives.

Afghanistan
The goal of the war was to root out al-Qaeda, which had undertaken the 09/11 attacks, and to destroy the local government that was sheltering them. This was accomplished. The 'failure' of all the mission-creep goals that followed is irrelevant. The harrying of al-Qaeda prevented it from launching any large-scale attacks such as those of 09/11. Mission accomplished.
I certainly agree with the Afghan argument, agreed back in 2003 and I still do despite the loss of mission view during the Bush administration and Obama's current approach...but hey, I'm no great military strategist so what do I know?
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Old 06-24-2016, 04:18 PM
 
Location: Eastern Washington
17,158 posts, read 56,898,950 times
Reputation: 18462
IMHO, the common theme in all these "Non-War Wars" was that the US went in without a clear idea of what "victory" would consist of. This is usually a recipe for disaster. Mission creep is easy to let happen when you don't really understand what the mission is.
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