
Why America Loses Every War It Starts - smacktoward
http://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2017/11/why-america-loses-every-war-it-starts/142646/
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cannonedhamster
Can we first define what winning a war and losing a war mean?

If we're talking about politically, yes we've lost the politic wars. The
reasons for that are straightforward. We don't care what the local populace
wants or realistically needs.

Militarily, we destroy the people we designate as enemies easily and without a
problem. Most wars of attrition are easy to win when you've got the bigger gun
and more people.

We need to stop thinking of wars as chess matches and start thinking of them
as 4x games where the populace actually matters and gaining hearts and minds
is actually important.

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cuspycode
What exactly counts as "starting a war"? The Korean war is mentioned here as
an example, but that war was started by the Korean communists when they
invaded South Korea on June 25, 1950. The United States UN-sanctioned
involvement was a reaction to that. Does that really count as "starting a
war"?

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nextstep
The media (and the author of this book) love to portray America as "stumbling"
into yet another conflict. Here's a great thread with numerous examples of
this:
[https://twitter.com/adamjohnsonNYC/status/878006629802713089](https://twitter.com/adamjohnsonNYC/status/878006629802713089)

Oops, we accidentally were forced into invading another country and building
another permanent military base. The "enemy" leave us no choice!

The purpose of these wars is not to "win" in the traditional sense, but rather
to ensure US business interests are being protected around the world. And by
that metric, Vietnam, the "Cold War", both Iraq wars, etc. have been
successful.

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noobhacker
Could you elaborate on how the Vietnam War succeeded in "protecting US
business interests around the world"?

In my view, first, the Vietnam War has little to do with "business interest,"
more with containing the spread of communism.

Second, the Vietnam War did not succeed in containing communism. After the
US's withdrawal, North Vietnam took the entire country, and North Vietnam
allies came to power in Laos and Cambodia.

So I'd count the Vietnam War as a big loss in terms of containing communism,
and a neutral in terms of protecting US business interest.

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Turing_Machine
> Second, the Vietnam War did not succeed in containing communism

Sure it did, or at least it helped. As with many conflicts of that era, North
and South Vietnam were proxies for the U.S.S.R. and the U.S.A.

Note that the U.S.S.R. no longer exists. It's been completely eliminated from
the face of the earth. That counts as winning, by most standards.

Vietnam started the process of bleeding them dry, and Afghanistan finished it.

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dragonwriter
Among other dubious things, they seem to be using “lose” to include what most
people would see as “win with less speed and/or greater cost and/or less
expansive goals than what some armchair generals speculate could have been
achieved with an alternative strategy in the same circumstances.”

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AnimalMuppet
Granada? Kosovo? Panama?

Nobody remembers the ones the US won quickly. They "don't count as real wars".

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macintux
Granada and Kosovo were both covered in the article.

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AnimalMuppet
> The Second Iraq War, launched in 2003, was rightly termed a fiasco. Even far
> smaller interventions — Beirut and Grenada in 1983, Libya in 2011 — failed.

And the article is wrong. The Second Iraq war was _not_ a fiasco - what
followed was. We needed to either occupy, in force, for a decade or two (like
we did Germany and Japan), or we needed to just say "We got Saddam, bye". We
tried to do nation-building on the cheap, and _that_ failed. The war itself
was very successful.

Grenada failed? By what standard is that true? That seems completely
disconnected from reality. It removed from power a government that was trying
to establish itself as a dictatorship, "disappearing" those who were opposed.

And still no mention of Panama.

So I'd say that, yes, the article mentions some of them in a way that tries
very hard to find the negatives so it can paint them as failures.

~~~
orwin
Irak war was also a political loss, and the "reconstruction" (almost alone,
without inviting former iraki interest holder, like Total, or emerging country
like Russia and/or China) was a moral, political and tactical mistake, and
made the US loose a lot of cultural influence imo, at least in France and
Germany. But i agree that the confirmation bias in the article is obvious.

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youdontknowtho
Defenseone is a good read for this kind of thing. People should also check out
Sofrep.com. I don't really always agree with their politics, but they have
some great posts/articles from people actually involved in hot spots around
the world.

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bruceb
>Donald Trump, fortunately, has not suffered a crisis such as 9/11, his
strategic judgment and understanding seem as

>poor as or even worse than his predecessors’.

Here is how he can win. Just don't engage at all. Unfortunately his speech on
Afghanistan was not reassuring. Just more of the same.

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creaghpatr
The title is the title of an upcoming book, the caveat being _since WWII. The
author does not argue that we_ actually* lost the Revolutionary War.

