Saudi Arabia might already have access to nuclear weapons earmarked by Pakistan, as part of an agreement, when Saudi Arabia helped fund Pakistan's nuclear program.
Could they learn from the mining industry? Terrible job, long hours in the middle of no-where (in Australia) and poor family life, but the salaries and benefits are huge. There is no shortage of people wanting to work in the mining industry.
It surprises me that this obvious solution is the one the government avoids the most. I would expect salaries to keep pace with the private sector. Especially when the cost of mistakes by a CEO (company goes bankrupt) is much less than the cost of a mistake by an officer (many people die). Might also stop the systemic corruption in the military AKA the revolving door between the military and private contractors.
The Vietnamese didn't need active participation from China or the USSR to win. It was seen as a war of independence, with a popular Northern Vietnamese government and a US puppet South Vietnam government, whose soldiers were unmotivated. The South Vietnam government only lasted as long as it did because of US assistance.
It is interesting to compare the Iraq and Afghanistan war (the US didn't militarily defeat Vietnam, and Korea was a military stalemate) with successful recent invasions. China invaded Tibet, and Russia invaded Chechnya, and Tibet is now part of China, and Chechnya contributes soldiers fighting in Ukraine. They differ from the US invasions in that they rebuilt the invaded areas, hence "winning the peace". The US also helped rebuild Japan and Germany, which was sadly lacking in Iraq and Afghanistan.
I would call the first Iraq war a success - the US achieved it's aims of driving Iraq out of Kuwait, destruction of the Iraq military, a UN resolution approving the attack, and wide support.
Contrast this to the second Iraq war and Afghanistan, where I agree the US was perceived as a bully. It bullied Pakistan ("You're with us or against us", war threats) into supporting the invasion of Afghanistan, and the invasion of Iraq was illegal, with France prepared to veto any UN resolution trying to legitimize the war.
> The US also helped rebuild Japan and Germany, which was sadly lacking in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Bingo! There would be no Taliban if USA made Afghanistan an unincorporated territory like Puerto Rico, handed out passports and rebuilt infrastructure / governance.
There was a plan for what to bomb, but no plan for what to build. Basically a huge waste of time.
I worked for a large telco, where we hosted all our servers. Each server ran multiple services bare-metal - no virtualization, and it was easy to rollout new services, without installing new servers. I missed the level of control over network elements and servers, the flexibility, and ability to debug by taking network traces anywhere in the network in my next job using AWS.
