‘This is not going to be won militarily’: Top US commander in Afghanistan reveals pessimism

[CBH1926]

10 minutes ago, SabreFan1 said:

There's a difference.  It's not the fighting that the US is losing at.  The US military isn't getting it's a*s kicked.

 

The general is saying that there's no way to win a war when the objective is basically just killing people.  Unless you decide to move in and take over the entire country or start killing them by the millions, you aren't going to "win". 

 

It would be like if I filled up your house with 100 people and decided to personally invade it.  I'm going to have to kill most or all of the 100 people there if I want to take it over free and clear.  On the flip side, I could decide to kill 10 and then chain up the other 90 and then take over the house, but then I'd have to deal with the people on the outside coming in to free the 90 people.  It would just be a never ending vicious cycle.

 

 

War without clear and achievable political goal is impossible to win.

Vague terms like establishing democracy, containment of communism etc. fall in that category. 

 

[kingofsurrey]

Sounds like Vietnam conflict.......

 

A war that can not be won ........

[SabreFan1]

5 minutes ago, CBH1926 said:

War without clear and achievable political goal is impossible to win.

Vague terms like establishing democracy, containment of communism etc. fall in that category.

I'm pretty sure that was the point of going into Afghanistan.  It was going to make Dick Cheney's buddies even richer.  Get into a war with no discernible goals and you can stay there indefinitely.

[SabreFan1]

4 minutes ago, kingofsurrey said:

Sounds like Vietnam conflict.......

 

A war that can not be won ........

Vietnam is a horse of a different colour.  The White House lied to get the country into that war and people were dying at an insane rate.

[kingofsurrey]

11 minutes ago, SabreFan1 said:

Vietnam is a horse of a different colour.  The White House lied to get the country into that war and people were dying at an insane rate.

Both were unwinnable conflicts though.....   

 

You don't think the USA government is lying to the public about what is really happening in Afghan ?  Really ?

[SabreFan1]

4 minutes ago, kingofsurrey said:

Both were unwinnable conflicts though.....   

 

You don't think the USA government is lying to the public about what is really happening in Afghan ?  Really ?

Nobody was fooled with Afghanistan.  Everybody knew they had nothing to do with 9/11.  The country was out for blood though and Cheney took advantage of that.

 

It was Iraq and it's non-existent WMD's that was the big lie.

[Ilunga]

2 hours ago, SabreFan1 said:

There's a difference.  It's not the fighting that the US is losing at.  The US military isn't getting it's a*s kicked.

 

The general is saying that there's no way to win a war when the objective is basically just killing people.  Unless you decide to move in and take over the entire country or start killing them by the millions, you aren't going to "win". 

 

It would be like if I filled up your house with 100 people and decided to personally invade it.  I'm going to have to kill most or all of the 100 people there if I want to take it over free and clear.  On the flip side, I could decide to kill 10 and then chain up the other 90 and then take over the house, but then I'd have to deal with the people on the outside coming in to free the 90 people.  It would just be a never ending vicious cycle.

 

 

Of course your not.

 

Polish a turd however a turd it will remain 

 

I will state this with certainity, that an equally numbered and armed force of Afghanis would kick the United States ass.

These guys have been repelling  invaders for centuries.

Besides you guys shoot more of yourselves than the enemy does.

 As I just stated in the Pittsburgh shooting thread your friendly fire casualties are mind boggling.

In the first gulf war 52 percent of your casualties were from friendly fire,up from 39 percent in Vietnam, which was up from 21 percent in WW2.

 

[SabreFan1]

6 hours ago, Ilunga said:

Of course your not.

 

Polish a turd however a turd it will remain 

 

I will state this with certainity, that an equally numbered and armed force of Afghanis would kick the United States ass.

These guys have been repelling  invaders for centuries.

Besides you guys shoot more of yourselves than the enemy does.

 As I just stated in the Pittsburgh shooting thread your friendly fire casualties are mind boggling.

In the first gulf war 52 percent of your casualties were from friendly fire,up from 39 percent in Vietnam, which was up from 21 percent in WW2.

Give an equal number of soldiers a rifle and set them in an area, of course the "home team" is going to win every time.  Take those same Afghan soldiers and drop them in a Louisiana swamp and the Afghans would equally be toast.  US soldiers are well trained, but they aren't given super soldier powers by an ancient Norse god straight out of boot camp.  

 

As for friendly fire, it stands to reason that the US would have more friendly fire injuries now.  Besides the fact that much less soldiers are fighting in these wars than in wars previous, so every soldier hit counts as a higher percentage towards the overall total, the US military heavily involves it's Air Forces in modern day warfare and you can't drop precision bombs the entire time because of the expense.  For instance about 25% of the deaths in the first Gulf War were caused by friendly fire.  Why so high?  Less than 150 soldiers were killed in that war.  You can kill that many with an errant 2 minute mortar barrage. 

 

The same thing happened in ancient times when they started to use bow and arrows.  They started to injure and kill more of their own side with friendly fire.

 

In WW2, especially in the beginning, the main fighting was strictly a whole lot of infantry infantry backed up by tanks.  The Germans were so successful with their Blitzkreig at the outset of the war because they used tanks as their own fast moving fighting force and the infantry came in to mop up afterwards.  That kept German casualties very low.

 

Vietnam was just a clusterf*ck that the soldiers didn't want to be in, and the US citizenry despised.

[RUPERTKBD]

Not everyone agrees, but it's worth noting that Afghanistan (and/or the area that the country now occupies) is known as "The Graveyard of Empires". Like Sabre said, the Afghans pretty much have the best home field advantage there is:

 

https://thediplomat.com/2017/06/why-is-afghanistan-the-graveyard-of-empires/

Spoiler

Where is the United States’ war in Afghanistan going? Recently, the Trump administration gave Secretary of Defense James Mattis the authority to set troop levels there; so far, rumors suggest that 4,000 more American troops may soon be on their way to Afghanistan. However, this may not be enough; occupying and administering Afghanistan is a herculean task that few empires have ever had success with. The Taliban continue to gain in strength, while ISIS is expanding throughout the country. The Taliban, ISIS, various warlords, and the Afghan government all continue to fight each other.

Writing in the Atlantic, Peter Beinart described the current U.S.-led war there as hopeless: the Taliban are unlikely to cut a deal because time is on their side, and they merely have to wait it out until the United States  decides to leave. The United States has been involved in Afghanistan for almost 16 years, making it the longest conflict in its history (with the possible exception of Vietnam, depending on how one interprets the chronology of that conflict). Despite spending more on Afghanistan than on rebuilding Europe after World War II, little progress has been made. It would not be surprising if the Taliban controlled all of Afghanistan within a decade.

Afghanistan is a notoriously difficult country to govern. Empire after empire, nation after nation have failed to pacify what is today the modern territory of Afghanistan, giving the region the nickname “Graveyard of Empires, ” even if sometimes those empires won some initial battles and made inroads into the region. If the United States and its allies decide to leave Afghanistan, they would only the latest in a long series of nations to do so. As the British learned in their 1839-1842 war in Afghanistan, it is often easier to do business with a local ruler with popular support than to support a leader backed by foreign powers; the costs of propping up such a leader eventually add up. The closest most historical empires have come to controlling Afghanistan was by adopting a light-handed approach, as the Mughals did. They managed to loosely control the area by paying off various tribes, or granting them autonomy. Attempts at anything resembling centralized control, even by native Afghan governments, have largely failed.

Afghanistan is particularly hard to conquer primarily due to the intersection of three factors. First, because Afghanistan is located on the main land route between Iran, Central Asia, and India, it has been invaded many times and settled by a plethora of tribes, many mutually hostile to each other and outsiders. Second, because of the frequency of invasion and the prevalence of tribalism in the area, its lawlessness lead to a situation where almost every village or house was built like a fortress, or qalat. Third, the physical terrain of Afghanistan makes conquest and rule extremely difficult, exacerbating its tribal tendencies. Afghanistan is dominated by some of the highest and more jagged mountains in the world. These include the Hindu Kush, which dominates the country and run through the center and south of the country, as well as the Pamir mountains in the east. The Pamir Knot — where the Hindu Kush, Pamir, Tian Shan, Kunlun, and Himalayas all meet is situated in Badakhshan in northeast Afghanistan.

A survey of Afghanistan’s history demonstrates how difficult it is to occupy and govern the country. We first get a clear glimpse into Afghanistan’s history around 500 BCE, when it formed the eastern part of the Achaemenid Persian empire. Parts of Afghanistan were previously part of the ancient Indian kingdom of Gandhara, a region in what is now northwest Pakistan and eastern Afghanistan. Presumably, much of southern and eastern Afghanistan was already inhabited by the ancestors of today’s Pashtun (also known as Afghans historically); their Pashto language is an ancient eastern Iranian language closely related to the even more ancient Avestan, the original language of the Zoroastrian scriptures. Afghanistan was relatively lightly populated at this time, as Alexander the Great is reported to have swept through the area with little resistance. Following this, the Maurya Empire from India controlled most of Afghanistan, although a Greek successor kingdom arose in Balkh (Bactria) in northern Afghanistan. Buddhism and Hinduism spread throughout the region during this period. It was only after the collapse of the Maurya Empire and several invasions from Central Asia that the mountains of Afghanistan began to “fill up,” and acquire its reputation of being the home of many warlike peoples defending their individual turfs. Many of the invaders assimilated into the tribal structure of the Pashtuns, adapting their language.

Various tribes founded empires within the Afghanistan region before breaking up into mini-statelets. These included the Greco-Bactrians, the Indo-Parthians, the Saka (Scythians), the great Buddha-building Kushans, the Kidarites, and the Hephthalites (White Huns). By this time, the region already acquired a difficult reputation. When the Arabs arrived in the region at the dawn of the 8th century, it was a patchwork of small but tough principalities. Attempts to conquer the Zunbils of Kandahar failed spectacularly, the first major setback faced by the Arabs after their great conquests began. An expedition of 20,000 men sent against the Zunbils returned with 5,000 people. It took almost 200 years for Afghanistan to be Islamicized from west to east, a process that only neared completion when Ya’qub ibn al-Layth al-Saffar, a Persian blacksmith born in Zaranj, in Afghanistan on the border with Iran conquered Kabul. Even then, the Hindu Shahi dynasty held out for another hundred years in the easternmost parts of today’s Afghanistan until conquered by Mahmud of Ghazni (also in Afghanistan) around the turn of the millennium.

When the Mongols arrived in Afghanistan, they faced so much resistance in the Bamiyan valley, which they besieged in 1221, that the grandson of Genghis Khan was killed. In fury, the Mongols killed most of the valley’s original inhabitants: most of the modern Hazara who live there are descended from a Mongol garrison, some of whose men took Tajik wives. Fragmentation ensued again after the weakening of the Mongol Empire.

Ẓahīr-ud-Dīn Muḥammad Babur, the first Mughal emperor, managed to get himself a kingdom in Kabul for two decades before conquering India. Most of the Hindu Kush region would remain under loosely Mughal control until 1738 when it was conquered by Nader Shah and inherited a decade later by Ahmad Shah Durrani, who founded modern Afghanistan after Nader Shah’s death. Mughal rule over Afghanistan was a combination of control over a few urban centers, and benign neglect coupled with paying off tribes in the region, a formula later replicated by the British. However, Mughal rule was always precarious, as they were faced with constant tribal revolts. An especially serious one from 1672-1677 led by the poet Khushal Khan Khattak was eventually defeated by the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb, but Mughal authority never extended beyond main roads again.

The Mughal Empire extended as far west as Ghazni and Bamiyan in central Afghanistan; after fighting with the Persian Safavids for Kandahar for decades, they lost it permanently during the reign of Shah Jahan. The Safavids also had to deal with unruly Afghan tribes. Eventually a revolt against the Safavids broke out in Kandahar in 1709 due to Persian attempts to control Pashtun tribes and convert them to Shia Islam. The Afghan revolt brought down the Safavid Empire; although partially checked by the rise of the warlord Nader Shah and his empire, eventually modern Afghanistan was founded in 1747 by Ahmad Shah Durrani, who picked off territory from Nader Shah’s descendants in Persia, the Mughals, and the Uzbeks to his north.

Since then, as both the British and Russians have learned, that while it is possible to conquer territory in Afghanistan temporarily, and defeat Afghans militarily in open battle, it is virtually impossible to hold the region down for long, when it is filled with guerrillas, tribes, and castles that can constantly weigh down a foreign power. The people of Afghanistan have nowhere to go, and can fight their whole lives (foreigners, beware in particular of the Kandahar region), a luxury that outsiders do not have. The United States should learn from the history of Afghanistan and understand that escalating the war will have no particular impact on the outcome. Minus a permanent occupation–which would be ineffective at best, and bloody and cost-prohibitive at worst–the only way to deal with Afghanistan is to deal with its plethora of local powers. And if this means accepting the Taliban, in exchange for a modicum of stability and a promise not to host global terrorist organizations, then so be it. The alternative is an unwinnable, never-ending war.

 

 

I've put the article in spoilers, because it's a bit long, but it gives some interesting perspective into how hard it is to win a military campaign in Afghanistan.

[Alflives]

11 hours ago, Ilunga said:

Of course your not.

 

Polish a turd however a turd it will remain 

 

I will state this with certainity, that an equally numbered and armed force of Afghanis would kick the United States ass.

These guys have been repelling  invaders for centuries.

Besides you guys shoot more of yourselves than the enemy does.

 As I just stated in the Pittsburgh shooting thread your friendly fire casualties are mind boggling.

In the first gulf war 52 percent of your casualties were from friendly fire,up from 39 percent in Vietnam, which was up from 21 percent in WW2.

 

Changing rules (on the US side) contributes to the higher numbers. 

[Alflives]

14 minutes ago, RUPERTKBD said:

Not everyone agrees, but it's worth noting that Afghanistan (and/or the area that the country now occupies) is known as "The Graveyard of Empires". Like Sabre said, the Afghans pretty much have the best home field advantage there is:

 

https://thediplomat.com/2017/06/why-is-afghanistan-the-graveyard-of-empires/

  Reveal hidden contents

 

Where is the United States’ war in Afghanistan going? Recently, the Trump administration gave Secretary of Defense James Mattis the authority to set troop levels there; so far, rumors suggest that 4,000 more American troops may soon be on their way to Afghanistan. However, this may not be enough; occupying and administering Afghanistan is a herculean task that few empires have ever had success with. The Taliban continue to gain in strength, while ISIS is expanding throughout the country. The Taliban, ISIS, various warlords, and the Afghan government all continue to fight each other.

Writing in the Atlantic, Peter Beinart described the current U.S.-led war there as hopeless: the Taliban are unlikely to cut a deal because time is on their side, and they merely have to wait it out until the United States  decides to leave. The United States has been involved in Afghanistan for almost 16 years, making it the longest conflict in its history (with the possible exception of Vietnam, depending on how one interprets the chronology of that conflict). Despite spending more on Afghanistan than on rebuilding Europe after World War II, little progress has been made. It would not be surprising if the Taliban controlled all of Afghanistan within a decade.

Afghanistan is a notoriously difficult country to govern. Empire after empire, nation after nation have failed to pacify what is today the modern territory of Afghanistan, giving the region the nickname “Graveyard of Empires, ” even if sometimes those empires won some initial battles and made inroads into the region. If the United States and its allies decide to leave Afghanistan, they would only the latest in a long series of nations to do so. As the British learned in their 1839-1842 war in Afghanistan, it is often easier to do business with a local ruler with popular support than to support a leader backed by foreign powers; the costs of propping up such a leader eventually add up. The closest most historical empires have come to controlling Afghanistan was by adopting a light-handed approach, as the Mughals did. They managed to loosely control the area by paying off various tribes, or granting them autonomy. Attempts at anything resembling centralized control, even by native Afghan governments, have largely failed.

Afghanistan is particularly hard to conquer primarily due to the intersection of three factors. First, because Afghanistan is located on the main land route between Iran, Central Asia, and India, it has been invaded many times and settled by a plethora of tribes, many mutually hostile to each other and outsiders. Second, because of the frequency of invasion and the prevalence of tribalism in the area, its lawlessness lead to a situation where almost every village or house was built like a fortress, or qalat. Third, the physical terrain of Afghanistan makes conquest and rule extremely difficult, exacerbating its tribal tendencies. Afghanistan is dominated by some of the highest and more jagged mountains in the world. These include the Hindu Kush, which dominates the country and run through the center and south of the country, as well as the Pamir mountains in the east. The Pamir Knot — where the Hindu Kush, Pamir, Tian Shan, Kunlun, and Himalayas all meet is situated in Badakhshan in northeast Afghanistan.

A survey of Afghanistan’s history demonstrates how difficult it is to occupy and govern the country. We first get a clear glimpse into Afghanistan’s history around 500 BCE, when it formed the eastern part of the Achaemenid Persian empire. Parts of Afghanistan were previously part of the ancient Indian kingdom of Gandhara, a region in what is now northwest Pakistan and eastern Afghanistan. Presumably, much of southern and eastern Afghanistan was already inhabited by the ancestors of today’s Pashtun (also known as Afghans historically); their Pashto language is an ancient eastern Iranian language closely related to the even more ancient Avestan, the original language of the Zoroastrian scriptures. Afghanistan was relatively lightly populated at this time, as Alexander the Great is reported to have swept through the area with little resistance. Following this, the Maurya Empire from India controlled most of Afghanistan, although a Greek successor kingdom arose in Balkh (Bactria) in northern Afghanistan. Buddhism and Hinduism spread throughout the region during this period. It was only after the collapse of the Maurya Empire and several invasions from Central Asia that the mountains of Afghanistan began to “fill up,” and acquire its reputation of being the home of many warlike peoples defending their individual turfs. Many of the invaders assimilated into the tribal structure of the Pashtuns, adapting their language.

Various tribes founded empires within the Afghanistan region before breaking up into mini-statelets. These included the Greco-Bactrians, the Indo-Parthians, the Saka (Scythians), the great Buddha-building Kushans, the Kidarites, and the Hephthalites (White Huns). By this time, the region already acquired a difficult reputation. When the Arabs arrived in the region at the dawn of the 8th century, it was a patchwork of small but tough principalities. Attempts to conquer the Zunbils of Kandahar failed spectacularly, the first major setback faced by the Arabs after their great conquests began. An expedition of 20,000 men sent against the Zunbils returned with 5,000 people. It took almost 200 years for Afghanistan to be Islamicized from west to east, a process that only neared completion when Ya’qub ibn al-Layth al-Saffar, a Persian blacksmith born in Zaranj, in Afghanistan on the border with Iran conquered Kabul. Even then, the Hindu Shahi dynasty held out for another hundred years in the easternmost parts of today’s Afghanistan until conquered by Mahmud of Ghazni (also in Afghanistan) around the turn of the millennium.

When the Mongols arrived in Afghanistan, they faced so much resistance in the Bamiyan valley, which they besieged in 1221, that the grandson of Genghis Khan was killed. In fury, the Mongols killed most of the valley’s original inhabitants: most of the modern Hazara who live there are descended from a Mongol garrison, some of whose men took Tajik wives. Fragmentation ensued again after the weakening of the Mongol Empire.

Ẓahīr-ud-Dīn Muḥammad Babur, the first Mughal emperor, managed to get himself a kingdom in Kabul for two decades before conquering India. Most of the Hindu Kush region would remain under loosely Mughal control until 1738 when it was conquered by Nader Shah and inherited a decade later by Ahmad Shah Durrani, who founded modern Afghanistan after Nader Shah’s death. Mughal rule over Afghanistan was a combination of control over a few urban centers, and benign neglect coupled with paying off tribes in the region, a formula later replicated by the British. However, Mughal rule was always precarious, as they were faced with constant tribal revolts. An especially serious one from 1672-1677 led by the poet Khushal Khan Khattak was eventually defeated by the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb, but Mughal authority never extended beyond main roads again.

The Mughal Empire extended as far west as Ghazni and Bamiyan in central Afghanistan; after fighting with the Persian Safavids for Kandahar for decades, they lost it permanently during the reign of Shah Jahan. The Safavids also had to deal with unruly Afghan tribes. Eventually a revolt against the Safavids broke out in Kandahar in 1709 due to Persian attempts to control Pashtun tribes and convert them to Shia Islam. The Afghan revolt brought down the Safavid Empire; although partially checked by the rise of the warlord Nader Shah and his empire, eventually modern Afghanistan was founded in 1747 by Ahmad Shah Durrani, who picked off territory from Nader Shah’s descendants in Persia, the Mughals, and the Uzbeks to his north.

Since then, as both the British and Russians have learned, that while it is possible to conquer territory in Afghanistan temporarily, and defeat Afghans militarily in open battle, it is virtually impossible to hold the region down for long, when it is filled with guerrillas, tribes, and castles that can constantly weigh down a foreign power. The people of Afghanistan have nowhere to go, and can fight their whole lives (foreigners, beware in particular of the Kandahar region), a luxury that outsiders do not have. The United States should learn from the history of Afghanistan and understand that escalating the war will have no particular impact on the outcome. Minus a permanent occupation–which would be ineffective at best, and bloody and cost-prohibitive at worst–the only way to deal with Afghanistan is to deal with its plethora of local powers. And if this means accepting the Taliban, in exchange for a modicum of stability and a promise not to host global terrorist organizations, then so be it. The alternative is an unwinnable, never-ending war.

 

 

I've put the article in spoilers, because it's a bit long, but it gives some interesting perspective into how hard it is to win a military campaign in Afghanistan.

Very informative.  I still believe the US military establishment wants these wars (like Afghanistan) to occur, and be lasting.  These sick bastards only care about selling their military equipment, and money.  The US, Russia, or the British could easily defeat the tribal fighters.  Modern weapons of mass destruction could do that.  There is no money in that though.  If there was more money in using these horrific weapons, I bet the military establishment bastards would do it.   

[RUPERTKBD]

9 minutes ago, Alflives said:

Very informative.  I still believe the US military establishment wants these wars (like Afghanistan) to occur, and be lasting.  These sick bastards only care about selling their military equipment, and money.  The US, Russia, or the British could easily defeat the tribal fighters.  Modern weapons of mass destruction could do that.  There is no money in that though.  If there was more money in using these horrific weapons, I bet the military establishment bastards would do it.   

If this is true, then it's a pretty clear case of the Socialism that America seems to be so afraid of.

 

I don't have the numbers for how much US Military contractors have made thanks to this conflict, but the numbers I can find for the cost to the American taxpayer are well over a Trillion and some articles cite over 2 trillion.

 

Bill Maher has been saying it for years: The American military budget is a make work project. (aka "Socialism) They don't need to spend such exorbitant amounts, but it keeps companies like Lockheed Martin, Boeing and General Dynamics in the black and it keeps people employed, whether they are actually necessary for national security, or not.

[Alflives]

1 minute ago, RUPERTKBD said:

If this is true, then it's a pretty clear case of the Socialism that America seems to be so afraid of.

 

I don't have the numbers for how much US Military contractors have made thanks to this conflict, but the numbers I can find for the cost to the American taxpayer are well over a Trillion and some articles cite over 2 trillion.

 

Bill Maher has been saying it for years: The American military budget is a make work project. (aka "Socialism) They don't need to spend such exorbitant amounts, but it keeps companies like Lockheed Martin, Boeing and General Dynamics in the black and it keeps people employed, whether they are actually necessary for national security, or not.

Make work yes.  But the US sure treats their vets poorly.  I guess there is no profit in taking proper care of veterans.

 

[RUPERTKBD]

4 minutes ago, Alflives said:

Make work yes.  But the US sure treats their vets poorly.  I guess there is no profit in taking proper care of veterans.

 

Just think how many veterans could be helped out if the military put the money spent of those $10,000 wrenches and $20,000 toilets towards the VA....

[Alflives]

41 minutes ago, RUPERTKBD said:

Just think how many veterans could be helped out if the military put the money spent of those $10,000 wrenches and $20,000 toilets towards the VA....

And that’s exactly why the military establishment are bastards.  They leave behind a trail of widows, orphans, broken families, and broken lives.  And it’s all in the name of profit.  Like you said before:  war is a way to employ people.  The horrible part is war is evil, and those who make profit from this evil are even worse.  

[Ilunga]

8 hours ago, SabreFan1 said:

Give an equal number of soldiers a rifle and set them in an area, of course the "home team" is going to win every time.  Take those same Afghan soldiers and drop them in a Louisiana swamp and the Afghans would equally be toast.  US soldiers are well trained, but they aren't given super soldier powers by an ancient Norse god straight out of boot camp.  

 

As for friendly fire, it stands to reason that the US would have more friendly fire injuries now.  Besides the fact that much less soldiers are fighting in these wars than in wars previous, so every soldier hit counts as a higher percentage towards the overall total, the US military heavily involves it's Air Forces in modern day warfare and you can't drop precision bombs the entire time because of the expense.  For instance about 25% of the deaths in the first Gulf War were caused by friendly fire.  Why so high?  Less than 150 soldiers were killed in that war.  You can kill that many with an errant 2 minute mortar barrage. 

 

The same thing happened in ancient times when they started to use bow and arrows.  They started to injure and kill more of their own side with friendly fire.

 

In WW2, especially in the beginning, the main fighting was strictly a whole lot of infantry infantry backed up by tanks.  The Germans were so successful with their Blitzkreig at the outset of the war because they used tanks as their own fast moving fighting force and the infantry came in to mop up afterwards.  That kept German casualties very low.

 

Vietnam was just a clusterf*ck that the soldiers didn't want to be in, and the US citizenry despised.

I would back the Afghanis any day of the week,history illustrates their ability to fight, you guys rely on firepower.

 

Mate your friendly fire stats are way higher than any other of the western nations.

And you shoot a lot of your allies in wars.

The Canadians refused to fight anywhere near you guys in WW1  after you mowed some of them down.

It's in your DNA to shoot the crap out of anything in front of you.

Before your civil war a large battle in Europe,ie a Agincourt or  Waterloo happened every 50 or so years.

In your civil war there was one every few months for a total of over 620,000 killed, a huge amount for that period of our species history.

You guys love your guns and using them to kill people.

 

As I have stated before I really feel for Americans like yourself, rational,logical,intelligent people who have to live with a bunch of they took our jerbs.

[Ilunga]

3 hours ago, Alflives said:

Changing rules (on the US side) contributes to the higher numbers. 

Alf they just blaze away at anything in front of them till they run out of ammunition.

The patents that came out of their civil war in regards to weapons changed warfare into what we know today.

They started out with rather inaccurate single shot rifles and ended up with multiple shot accurate rifles and weapons like the gattling gun.

And the generals invovled did not really change their tactics, they lined up and shot the crap out of each other.

[Ilunga]

2 hours ago, Alflives said:

And that’s exactly why the military establishment are bastards.  They leave behind a trail of widows, orphans, broken families, and broken lives.  And it’s all in the name of profit.  Like you said before:  war is a way to employ people.  The horrible part is war is evil, and those who make profit from this evil are even worse.  

War is in our species DNA.

 

There always has been some sort of conflict and there probably always will be.

 

Chimps v Benobos Brother.

[SabreFan1]

How do you inch the defence budget closer to a Trillion dollars if you're the US defence department?  You fearmonger and tell people that you can't win a war against two other world powers. 

 

Nevermind the fact that Russia has repeatedly said for decades that an attack against it would result in immediately launching nuclear missiles which of course would end the world as we know it. 

 

Ignore the fact that China is at about 20 years away from equaling the US military where it is now let alone where it will be in a couple of decades. 

 

Nevermind that the Navy complained to Congress that it was sending them so many warships that they didn't have the proper manpower needed for them.

 

The money wasters at the Pentagon eventually need that phat 13 digit budget!  They don't specifically say a trillion, but that's where they eventually want it to go.  Feed us more or we will lose to the combined forces of Haiti and the Dominican Republic.... wait they don't like each other?  Ok, we'll lose to those mighty Cubans?  Huh, their vehicles are still from the 50's and 60's?  Ok, Ok, we've got it....  Those warmongering Canadians!

 

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/u-s-military-crisis-could-lose-war-russia-china-report-n936431

 

 

[NewbieCanuckFan]

On 2018-11-03 at 10:34 PM, kingofsurrey said:

Sounds like Vietnam conflict.......

 

A war that can not be won ........

I'd actually argue that they kind of won in the end.  Look at what the government of Vietnam views more favorably... China or the US.  You can even make the argument that a large number of it's citizen's have a pretty high opinion of the US (excluding those of course much of those that were alive during police action).  Such a waste of manpower & money (not to mention the devastation wrought to that country).