re: Those who served - would you say the US military is still the best in the world?

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Probably bombing the entirety of each country, so civilians cities and stuff like that. So I guess maybe it wasn’t so much humanitarian reasons, but trying to nation build, which is what kept us from just bombing the crap outta Vietnam and Afghanistan. You can’t nation build a country that you just bombed the shite out of. But we did bomb the shite out of Iraq and tried to nation build there so that’s not a totally accurate theory either.

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What exactly do you think was worth bombing in Afghanistan, outside of a few major cities there is no infrastructure to bomb? And I can assure you having been there, those cities are not worth bombing, they are already heaps of garbage. I agree we shouldn't be in the business of nation building but to think more bombs would have led to a quicker victory in Afghanistan is an ill informed statement. We successfully defeated the Taliban and then American leadership got us mixed up in a drug war disguised a religious war against the west. We should have pulled out the day OBL was killed and left behind a couple of thousand folks in Bagram going forward for our benefit, not to train or equip the Afghans

Never in the history of the world has a nation with substantially more money who intended to win a war lost a war. War is an expensive undertaking and no nation can come close to matching the US dollar for dollar. Political will is a whole nother can of worms. Any nation on the planet who is stupid enough to remove the security US tax payers provide the rest of the world is stupid beyond words. China sure ain't it...if Taiwan did not exist China would have to invent Taiwan. Russia sure ain't it...without the US they have all or Asia and Europe to hold at bay. It could and probably will happen someday but the only way the US looses its grip on power around the world is for the US to implode...and way too many Americans dream about killing their neighbor because they see the world slightly different.

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My assumption is that our military - in a clearly defined conflict where we're not focused on making sure the indigenous force is handheld and in the fight and we're not trying to follow some script about peacekeeping/avoiding occupation/etc. - would still dominate

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Political will...always an issue in the United States with the exception of WW2 AFTER Pearl Harbor and maybe the first 2-3 years after 9/11. The vast majority of Americans wanted no part of WW1, Vietnam or Korea. WW2 was a European problem until Pearl Harbor. For all the world's opinion and US chest beating about being war mongers the US is mostly a peaceful nation with loads of cash....but poke the bear and you will FAFO. Cash and political will is what it takes to "win" a war. Win is a relative term because no one actually wins when folks start dying....

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We should have pulled out the day OBL was killed and left behind a couple of thousand folks in Bagram going forward for our benefit, not to train or equip the Afghans

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I wouldn't have even left a contingent at Bagram. Sounds like you know this but there's nothing to "win" in Afghanistan unless you want to grow poppy. The people are utterly ungovernable and the infrastructure has a negative net worth. It's a fixer-upper than nobody can afford to fix up, and even if you did there's a termite vs ant war throughout the entire house and you can't use pesticides. We should have punished them, killed OBL then walked away.

the more bombs we dropped in Afghanistan and Vietnam, the more Taliban and Viet Cong we made.

i can think of literally no way we could have effected (affected? i can never remember) lasting change in Afghanistan short of dumping a million or more troops in there to fully occupy and maintain security. even then, probably not.

in Vietnam we could have definitely bombed the ever-loving frick out of Hanoi and put troops on the ground in North Vietnam and defeated them fairly easily...except that China is right there to the north, and, well, that whole Korean thing had us a little gun shy about getting into another tangle with them.

all that to say that neither of those military defeats were due to us not killing enough people, at least in the frame of the way that those wars (not really "wars" per se, but counter insurgency operations) were being waged.

Iraq is a litte different because they were an actual nation state that we defeated early on. but long term success in Iraq wasnt due to bombing the shite out them, but rather due to large troop levels that REDUCED violence, not increased it.

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I’m not saying it was worth bombing cities there, and that we should have, was just a reply to the posters on here who think we lost the conflict in Afghanistan. It’s just an opportunity for those posters to knock on our military’s capabilities. We did what we went there to do but then got caught up trying to do more then what was intended. I mean if we bombed every city and village the Taliban would cease to exist

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we would have had to bomb every city and village in Afghanistan AND Pakistan, and Pakistan was/is an ally (sort of).

however, to your larger point that war with Russia and/or China wouldnt likely have the same limitations put on it as a counterinsurgency (necessarily) does, and that the US military would be fighting to its strength - i concur.

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It's hard to imagine how hard combined arms manuever is to pull off.

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And the logistics support dance required is even harder, although a lot safer.

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i can think of literally no way we could have effected (affected? i can never remember) lasting change in Afghanistan short of dumping a million or more troops in there to fully occupy and maintain security. even then, probably not.

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Most effective way would be to go after the opium trade, not the fields, but the actual global actors that control it. It has always been a drug war but the people fighting against the west just don't see that because they are to blinded by religious ideology. They see it as fighting the great infidel, when in reality, they are just lining drug dealers pockets in the name of allah

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It is one field where I and others believe the military is going to have to start admitting folks like that at advanced rank otherwise they won't come to the military.

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If you're talking about bringing in people as an O4 and they aren't picking up rifles, yet have rank and authority, then that's a red flag that you have the wrong answer. Make them DoD civilians and be done with it.