re: USA has lost its last two major wars

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Became the dictatorship of earth and we wouldn’t have all the uprisings and wars that’s happened since WW2

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You realize the CIA was the root cause of most of the uprisings and wars since WW2, right?

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Kinda feels like a war and an occupation are 2 different animals

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Yep. We fought a war against the military of Ba'athist controlled Iraq and kicked the shite out of them in a couple weeks. I saw it happen. I was there.

Then we proceeded to "occupy" them for a fricking decade and couldn't stop tripping over our own dicks. Should be a lesson there somewhere.

The military did what it was designed to do- defeat a conventional army on a battlefield. It fricked up the "nation building" part which I would argue should never have been its role in the first place. Brenner screwed the pooch almost from day one when he disbanded the Iraq army.

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We were not even fighting in Afghanistan any more. The last American KIA in Afghanistan was February of last year. we’d moved on to advisory and peacekeeping. Last year the cost of being in Afghanistan made up a whopping 1% of the national budget.

The truth is the Afghan Army for the past several years had shouldered the majority of the fighting and the last 5-6 years virtually all the fighting on the ground. Look at the casualty rates year by year:
American casualties by month and year

Research by Brown University estimates losses in the Afghan security forces at 69,000

The last time the US monthly casualty total was even in double digits was June 2014 when 13 servicemen died.

So the truth of Afghanistan was is has not been a “forever war” for the US. The Afghan Army was doing the fighting and were waging the type of war we trained them to fight, namely a combined arms land/air war where ground units could and did rely on air support for both combat and logistics needs. When Biden pulled eveyone out he also took the civilian contractors who maintained the Afgan air assets. Suddenly the Afghan army that has been fighting for years found it’s main ally was abandoning them and worse yet crippling their air assets. This is why the Afghan army collapsed in sudden fashion.

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Excellent insight! Thank you.

Let me add a tid-bit of historical military history fact, just as a point of interest. I refer everyone to the North Vietnamese Army Offensive of Spring, 1972, the Year of the Rat. By 1972, the USA had greatly reduced its military footprint in Vietnam. The South Vietnamese Army was assigned to task to defend their country, and they were trained like the A-ghan forces, to do so backed by US air support assets from the USAF and USN.

In sum, the South Vietnamese Army was greatly challenged by this North Vietnamese Army offensive, but, KICKED NVA-arse. The Communist military forces were so thoroughly depleted by this defeat that it took them another three years to build up enough strength to launch another offensive - the 1975 offensive that ended the war.

IF the USA had not pulled the air support assets from A-ghan, the A-ghan Army probably would have defeated the Taliban in recent days. The decision to end all US air support operations IS the decisive factor in this military defeat of this US ally.

We have lost a lot more than two wars recently.

If the US doesn't allow the French to go back in to Vietnam after WWII, Vietnam is a democracy within 10 years and the war never happens

usa is undefeated in major wars. usa has a losing record in guerrilla conflicts.

We didn't lose either of those wars. We won easily. However, we were unable to build a democratic coalition that could withstand the religious fanatics. That's not losing a war, dipshit.

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It really is amazing to me how numerous post WWI and WWII decisions have caused so many calamitous effects on world security nearly a century later

The Middle East Borders
India-Pakistan
China-Taiwan
Vietnam
Korea
Africa post colonialism

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fricking Gavrilo Princip

You can't win a war when the rules of engagement are "Don't shoot them unless they shoot at you first" especially when you are "fighting" on their turf. Anybody could be an enemy and they can position themselves anywhere they want, can't shoot em. You won't know until the lead is flying or they already have assault rifles drawn.

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Go figure! The USA is just stupid, when it comes to too many very important things that nation-states should learn to do well.

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We were the only ones not doing well
In WWI tactics.