re: What’s the functional purpose of the Army and Marines at this point?

quote:

---

Just like the trophy room at Jerdin' Hare

---

Sick burn

Just as sick as your army "burns." I don't gaf what you think about the army.

You aren't capable of listing them so how can you know that?

So far... Iran. And a ground war in Ukraine that would end in nuclear war. What else ya got?

We need every troop we have in this country. The numbers aren’t a chance guess of what we need but a part of an extremely well thought out plan by war strategist. It’s not about politics no matter your party or how you feel the war in Iran is going or how much you like our president. Thank God we have A President that values life and will likely not commit these well trained fighters into a war unless absolutely necessary. If he does, Iran will quickly learn what a slaughter of life looks like. But it’s ignorant to believe we also will not lose lives. Democrats will not have a stomach for this slaughter or loss of u s service members lives but it is also true they will criticize no matter what our president does, taco if he does nothing and Hitler if he does anything.

quote:

---

I posted this yesterday in a dead thread but it equally applies here----Our system itself can’t reliably produce finished wars unless the objective is narrow and short-term. Whether that’s a feature or a bug is up for debate.

We’re designed to require consent, and consent has a shelf life. Long wars demand consistency across years, sometimes decades. Our system resets leadership, priorities, and tolerance for cost every election cycle.

Past empires didn’t have that constraint. Rome didn’t need to maintain public buy-in to finish a campaign. Britain didn’t run imperial wars through a population that could do anything meaningful to halt them midstream. The decision loop was tight, centralized, and insulated from the kind of political pressure that forces course changes here. They could define victory however they wanted and take as long as necessary to get there. We can't.

Our wars operate on two tracks at once: the battlefield and political ambitions. The second one eventually always dominates. Casualties, cost, and ambiguity erode support, and once that happens, the objective shifts from “win” to “end this without it looking like a loss.” That’s the pattern people keep misreading as softness.

And this is why “Americans lost the stomach for it” misplaces blame. It assumes populations in past empires were somehow more committed to long, grinding wars. They weren’t. The difference is it didn’t fricking matter. Their consent wasn’t required.

Here, they do. That’s the constraint. You can call it moral, you can call it limiting, but it’s real. So when someone says “we’ll escalate if needed,” the obvious follow-up is: to what end, and for how long? Because escalation inside a system that can’t sustain long, ambiguous conflicts isn’t a path to victory. We.ve seen this again and again.

It’s also not a coincidence that our two most brutal, sustained wars, the Civil War and World War II, were prosecuted under single administrations with continuity of leadership and total commitment. That’s the lesson: given our political constraints, the only way we reliably finish wars is by committing fully to decisive victory as fast as possible, or not starting them at all. That’s the mistake we keep making.

---

this is a great fricking post