Most of those conflicts are a pretense to funnel trillions of dollars into the economy, but almost always also a fight to maintain spheres of influence. This was certainly true for the Vietnam war, where above all a communist Indonesia had to be avoided, but also obviously for any conflict in the Middle east.
What I find worrying is that the War on Terror is a poor substitute for the Cold War. The enemy is technologically unsophisticated, so there is no chance of a sputnik shock, no real competition to gain the upper hand technologically and therefore potentially less incentive to use the vast resources of the military to fund high technology research as it was the case during the Cold War.
Moreover the technology developed to "hunt terrorists" can be turned against the population much more easily than the rockets, nuclear weapons and computer systems of the past.
Moreover the technology developed to "hunt terrorists" can be turned against the population much more easily than the rockets, nuclear weapons and computer systems of the past.
You've hit on it in a nutshell, I think.
The entire War on Terror is predicated upon the idea that a) we must ferret out and neutralize threats before they manifest and b) we must occupy regions which may generate threats.
Those two policies directly manifest in the development of advanced surveillance and techniques of oppression. Even more sickeningly, there is no way of proving it wrong: if something bad happens, the answer is to increase efforts; and if nothing bad happens, the answer is not to cutback the defenses that presumably prevented that nothing.
You aren't quite hitting the nail on the head. It's not about funneling money into the economy, it's about manipulating the systems of governance to make theft of public resources and money tenable. It's the same reason that we have predictable "unpredictable" "bubbles" in the economy and it is why we start wards who's sole purpose is justification to steal public money for private gains. In many ways, there is even a disincentive to winning a war or military conflict at all. Imagine if we had responded to the 9/11 attacks in a smart manner; it would have cost maybe upper double digit millions of dollars to apprehend or kill OBL, but going into Afghanistan like buffoon cost us no less than $1,000,000,000,000.00 in direct expenditures and probably about another trillion in opportunity cost and indirect costs.
THAT's the name of the game. Stealing public money to enrich private individuals. As long as there is an incentive to manipulate America into blowing our money and efforts on military boondoggles, we will do exactly that.
"Most of those conflicts are a pretense to funnel trillions of dollars into the economy,"
This is called military Keynesianism. It's how you can sell Keynesian economics in conservative societies that oppose anything resembling "social" spending. Since it's somehow not wasteful or "socialist" to funnel unlimited stimulus money through the defense budget, that's where it gets funneled.
The catch is that you have to have a war somewhere to keep justifying it.
The economy means different things to different people. The black economy is part of the economy but I would not want to funnel trillions of dollars into it. Similarly the arms trade is part of the economy but I wouldn't want to funnel a trillion dollars into it every year.
For my money the century of mechanised was has been about taking money out of the economy and into the arms-trade. This shows up as GDP and is therefore a good thing but it is at the expense of things like schools and hospitals. Government borrowing has been at record levels during the 'terror' years, government spending on weapons has been at an all time high. The money gets borrowed from the banks that the politicians know so well. It is a virtuous cycle for them but not us even if that is what they say.
I would argue that the entire point is to destabilize regions. Its a technique that all superpowers have used in the past, and continue to use today. The point is not "to win".
Not to worry. With how things are going in Ukraine, we'll have a great war in Europe again before you know it, with a "real" enemy (Russia). (And we have all that anti-terror stuff to prevent any broad and effective anti-war movement developing... both on the NATO side and on the Russian side). With any "luck" it'll be like when monarchies went to war in the middle ages. Invest in DynCorp International and Academi (nee Blackwater) now.
One desert night on a Marine base outside Basra, I chatted with an Egyptian interpreter hired by the US military. Knowing that Cairene Arabic is vastly different from that of Southern Iraq, I asked him if he had any trouble understanding the local dialect. He shook his head. “I have no idea what they are saying. I have a much easier time understanding you.” His English was excellent, which is presumably why he got the job, but his comprehension of Basrawi Arabic was almost nonexistent. But Marine officers, who inevitably spoke no Arabic, depended on him to explain what the locals were trying to tell them. Since the interpreter just made up what he thought his bosses wanted to hear, the Marines were operating with negative intelligence.
As good a synopsis of the last 60 years of this country's foreign policy, as any.
Both of them - the Egyptians and the Basrawis - are able to communicate without issue using Modern Standard Arabic, and worse comes to worse, the Basrawis wouldn't have much problem to emulate the Egyptian accent (almost all of the TV dramas, films, actors and music is in a Lebanese and Egyptian accent, so pretty much every Iraqi living in Iraq would have no issue with it). It would never reach a point where they can't communicate with each other.
The paragraph itself seems slightly misleading or enhanced for dramatic effect. If this situation did actually take place as claimed, it's likely that the locals were intentionally trying to confuse the interpreter.
The "don’t invade a country if you are too lazy to learn the language" point is particularly telling. When the post-9/11 wars started, I thought one of the highest priorities would be to get combat units to a point where they didn't need external interpreters for the regions they were going to be operating in. An interpreter is a massively dangerous potential point of failure -- he could be incompetent, as the article suggests, or worse, he could be actively conspiring with the enemy to tip them off about your movements, feed you misleading info and make you look bad to the locals. If you can't speak at least the rudiments of the language yourself, you have no way of knowing. But after a decade of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, American combat units appear to be just as dependent on external interpreters as they were going in.
I suspect part of the reason for this that the article doesn't touch on is the idea of the rotation. Combat units don't see themselves as being stationed in Iraq "for the duration," but as units that happen to be in Iraq today but could be in Afghanistan tomorrow and Korea the day after that. What's the benefit of learning Pashto today if you're leaving Afghanistan in three months and may never rotate back there again?
Americans live in their own isolated world. If you understand the culture you don't need to make the war or could reduce it to the minimum.
E.g. In the first Gulf war the Americans told the population to go against Saddam because they were to enter Iraq. A significant part of the people did.
But Americans left betraying those who had supported them. Repression by Sadam was terrible, over a million people died. Americans couldn't care less about them.
This action alone meant USA was never going to be trusted again in Iraq because families don't forget the betrayal, and never will until the widow of the man who was tortured and killed for helping Americans is alive.
Another example is how the Americans burned poppy fields in Afghanistan while not replacing it with anything that could make the families live.
Helping people growing food puts families on your side.
I had been in safe places of Afganistan and Iraq. The people there prefer non Americans like British army because they have much more experience helping native communities, and understand their culture much better.
"But after a decade of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, American combat units appear to be just as dependent on external interpreters as they were going in."
Back in '01, had a .mil security clearance in the 90s and was dumb enough to think I could learn Arabic as kind of a moonlighting job, that dotcom bubble wasn't looking so hot anymore, but, why bother, just like the first gulf war we'll be outta there in less than a year so I won't have enough time to learn Arabic. That being 14 years ago...
An interesting startup idea would be shaking up existing translation services. It would be difficult and non-trivial. Ideal startup field!
This reminds me of a family anecdote. My great-uncle was a French officer in Indochina and, through fuzzy circumstances to do with his previous service, learnt to speak a few of the local dialects, although this was not widely known.
At the negotiating table with a leader from a neutral local faction, his interpreter, who was sympathetic to the enemy, was changing the meaning of everything said to make the negotiations fail. After letting the charade go on for a while, great-uncle spoke up in the local dialect to the great surprise of both the interpreter and the other party, which resulted in one less living interpreter and one more alliance for the French.
I think the only reason there would be to not learn the language and culture is that it would humanize the opponent and garner empathy which would lead to inefficiencies in combat.
The problem is that most "wars" the US has been involved in across the recent decades weren't conventional wars, even when the US was treating them as if they were.
The ongoing "wars" in Iraq and Afghanistan (which miraculously have been "ended" unilaterally by the US many times over) aren't wars. They're garrisons.
Even ISIS (ISIL?) isn't a conventional enemy, despite having tanks. These aren't nation states and those aren't, for the most part, soldiers.
The reason the "War on Terror" is still treated as a war is that there is no reason not to. The article explains that quite nicely.
I think many of the points raise are very valid areas of improvement, for example: "Learn the Language"; Others are products of politician reality: "Fear of Casualties".
But I think the premise: "the World’s Biggest Military Keeps Losing Wars", is wrong.
1. Conventional forces have trouble wining asymmetrical conflicts unless they are allowed to wage total war (which is usually precluded by modern political/moral concerns). Nothing new here- the Romans had experience with this.
1.A Note the single "win" on the list of post-Korea conflicts was the first Gulf War, a conventional conflict.
1.B It is arguable that the U.S. is actually better than most other conventional militaries at asymmetrical warfare: http://www.warriorlodge.com/blogs/news/16298760-a-french-sol..., however that may just be a product of being better at conventional warfare improving overall fitness.
2. "Winning" define this? Winning means very different things in total war vs. occupation/garrison/nation building actions. While its fair to say the U.S. lost Vietnam, I think its fair to say the U.S. won in Iraq and Afghanistan as they are now governed by friendly democracies... Military action is just a way of attempting to physically impose political will- If a nation's military helps the leaders reach their goals, it won.
> While its fair to say the U.S. lost Vietnam, I think its fair to say the U.S. won in Iraq and Afghanistan as their are now governed by friendly democracies...
No. Iraq is fractured into halves. The northern half is controlled by ISIS, the southern by a dysfunction democracy where the elections are not about ideas and policies, but rather about Sunnis vs Shiites. Afghanistan is also sectarian. Neither are anything we'd recognize as free and stable democracies. In a lot of ways, ordinary citizens in both places are worse off than before the wars.
Our wars there were brutal, protracted, expensive, and ultimately didn't work.
Yes, the blogger undermines his thesis by describing what a success Afghanistan was. U.S. special forces infiltrated the country, worked with the outnumbered Northern Alliance and coordinated air strikes to devastate the Taliban to the point where they fled into Pakistan.
Of course, the Pakistanis continued to fund and arm these guys so they came back. That was a political failure rather than a military one. Had the U.S. military been allowed, they would have followed the Taliban across the border. As it is, U.S. drone attacks regularly harry the Taliban in Waziristan and prevent them from regrouping.
Now, Iraq, that was a wrong headed conflict from 1991 on. It would have been preferable to leave Saddam in power, vile though he was. Al Qaeda might still have destabilized his country, but the Sunni tribesmen were loyal to him and would not have turned as they did when the Americans had taken over.
>I think its fair to say the U.S. won in Iraq and Afghanistan as they are now governed by friendly democracies...
I dispute that Iraq is governed by a friendly democracy. Iraq, presently is largely split between the Islamic State and the post-Saddam regime currently headed by Haider El-Abadi. Neither is especially friendly towards the US at this point. Islamic State is... well, Islamic State. The Abadi administration, on the other hand, has largely fallen into the orbit of Iran, owing to their shared Shia Islam heritage.
The outcome of the Iraq War reminds me of the old joke about the French and Indian War. "Who won the French and Indian war? It was the British." Likewise, "Who won the America/Iraq war? The Iranians."
Iraq is close to being governed by Islamic State. I'm not sure it is a good definition of "winning" either. Sounds more like US won the match, but lost the game.
> , I think its fair to say the U.S. won in Iraq and Afghanistan as they are now governed by friendly democracies...
With wins like these, who needs loses. The US army and state department failed to deliver tangible political product. End of story. Both places are a total mess and the world is more dangerous because of that.
You can lose a war, without losing a single combat, if you fail to deliver on your objectives.
Article is much better than I thought it would be. Money quote is last sentence: "The most fundamental reason America’s huge military can’t win wars is that it doesn’t need to." He's exactly right.
Bill Lind has done some deep thinking on why the US military can't win modern wars (tldr: the armed forces are a graft system, not a war system; no one has figured out how to fight non-state and semi-state wars without going full roman burn-and-crucify.)
I highly recommend his articles and books, particularly to people on the left who might be initially put off by his social conservatism.
The answer is that we have been goaded into seeing our military as a tool rather than an necessary and reluctant engagement for self defense, by an enemy more heinous, pernicious, and destructive than any enemy our country will ever face. The enemy within and in our midst, the military services cabal that does not care whether American wins or looses, as long as we are engaged in or agitating and preparing for war and the money flows.
If anyone had any interest in preventing our warmongering, they would look at changing the incentive structure that surges towards war and death and killing and supporting despotic foreign dictators and shelters horrible people who do horrible things in our own country. As long as we want to condemn foreigners while giving immunity to degenerate f!@#-ups like Rumsfeld and the whole Bush administration, there is nothing more that can be done. They should have all been thrown alive in a grinder and turned into pig feed for the high treason of deliberately and knowingly lying to America and the world and starting wars that killed Americans for no reason. We are a hollow farce if we can't apply the same Nuremberg Trial precedent to our own leaders.
I think this is the problem with a professional army. I bet Vietnam would have gone on for much longer if there had been only volunteers there. And the Iraq invasion would not have happened of there had been a draft.
Suppose an Arab military force was currently bringing peace and freedom to the oil-rich, violence-torn country of Texas. What would they be reading in the Arab newspapers five years after the occupation of Texas?
They’d be learning about the minute doctrinal differences and the irreconcilable rivalries between Catholic Hispanics and Protestant anglos, and even between Southern Methodists and Southern Baptists. They’d all know about Texas’s long love affair with guns, explaining why Texans were killing Arab soldiers. They’d constantly be reminded that the dominant minority in east Texas is African-American, while in west Texas it is Hispanic.
Everybody in the Arab world would know far more about Texas than any sane non-Texan should ever want to know — without understanding anything at all.
If you don't understand, it's dangerous to convince yourself you do.
Thats a bit pedantic, as well as inaccurate. I wouldn't call any party in the War of 1812 a clear winner, as there were gains and losses of approximately equal value in the end.
So depending on how you want to view the Civil War, the US was 6-0-1, or 5-0-2, until Vietnam.
It won both Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Both governments were overthrown, pretty quickly too which was their original goal. With Afghanistan they had a secondary goal to find Bin Laden they achieved that goal too.
hat then happened was what is commonly known as peacekeeping. They then got hammered by what is commonly known as terrorist using guerrilla warfare. Even then, not like they lost.
I'm all up for bashing America, but let's not bash them for not carpet bombing a bunch of civilians.
There's a difference between winning the war and winning the peace.
In Iraq, we won the war hands-down. We went in to effect regime change and bring Saddam to justice. We did exactly that. We toppled Saddam's regime, established a new one in its place, and then captured and executed the man himself.
However, we lost the peace badly. We failed to anticipate the rebels, the influx of al-Qaeda, the sectarian civil war, the rise of ISIS, etc.
The British were able to control vast swaths of the world with minimal military power. They fought smart.
I remember watching Restrepo and other similar documentaries. I come from a tribal culture too; and there were several instances where I could clearly see how the Americans were making a mistake in their dealing with the locals. Those people have been living and dying by their tribal codes for millennia, and "democracy" and "freedom" means nothing to them.
Minor nitpick: it was GHW Bush who committed US troops to Somalia, just as he was leaving office, in December 1992; a nice welcoming present for Clinton.
Edited: It was pappy Bush, not Dubya. Thanks @theorique :)
I believe it all boils down to the facts revealed by the Millennium Challenge 2002, a massive battle exercise conducted by the US military. The exercise simulated a conflict between the US ('blue force') and a hypothetical middle-eastern nation ('red force').
During the exercises, the red leader (Lt. Gen. Paul van Riper) used asymmetric warfare strategies, designed to exploit weaknesses in US military doctrine. Rather than using radio and risking eavesdropping, orders were sent via motorcycle courier and signal lamps. Rather than squaring up along battlelines, the red team used hit-and-run attacks, including suicide bombings. After massive losses for the blue team, the exercise was reset and the red leader was ordered to follow a preordained script to ensure a blue victory. The exercise was deemed a complete success.
The US military learned absolutely nothing from this exercise, and continued to make exactly the same mistakes in Iraq and Afghanistan. There is a doctrinal belief in the 'correct' way to win a war, and the notion that technological and logistical advantages can guarantee victory in any conflict. US military strategy is designed to justify procurement decisions post-hoc, rather than actually win wars. We invest heavily in eavesdropping infrastructure, therefore it is strategically invaluable. We have a fleet of multirole fighters, therefore air supremacy is a vital objective. There is an ideological drive to transform all warfare into the bloodless technological dispute of the cold war, regardless of reality.
To quote Lt. Gen. van Riper:
"My experience has been that those who focus on the technology, the science, tend towards sloganeering. There's very little intellectual content to what they say, and they use slogans in place of this intellectual content. It does a great disservice to the American military, the American defense establishment. 'Information dominance,' 'network-centric warfare,' 'focused logistics'—you could fill a book with all of these slogans.
What I see are slogans masquerading as ideas. In a sense, they make war more antiseptic. They make it more like a machine. They don't understand it's a terrible, uncertain, chaotic, bloody business. So they can lead us the wrong way. They can cause people not to understand this terrible, terrible phenomenon."
I remember eating lunch on February 5th, 2005. We were at the Officer's Club at the Naval Academy. All the officers had assembled to hear a lecture by Admiral Crowe, one of our political science professors, better known from his time as the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He forwent his prepared remarks to discuss current events, opening with "Perhaps we would all be better served watching CNN right now, to hear Colin Powell address the UN General Assembly. Unfortunately, I am afraid the machinery of war is to far gone for any of it to make a difference."
"I am afraid the machinery of war is to far gone for any of it to make a difference."
That sentence will ring in my ears for the rest of my life.
What is conveniently avoided is that Japan, Germany and South Korea are at (relative) peace and prosperous because of immense investment by the US. All three are still, technically, militarily occupied territory.
The wars were total wars, won at the cost of millions of lives and financial and industrial commitments that reshaped the culture of both nations, at enormous civilian costs especially on the losing side (Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima...) and the territory kept at peace via millions of boots on the ground, enormous military effort (how much does Okinawa cost per annum?) and enormous financial spending, justified by Pax Americana being presumably worth more than its bill. In the case of WWI, not invading the losing power after breaking its will to fight resulted in a worse war a couple decades later.
Another unpalatable and often glossed over fact is that in both Germany and Japan, middle management was kept in power because the invading authority (such as MacArthur) realised that chaos would follow otherwise, and that in a statist, single-party state, all the talent would converge to the ruling party anyway.
Today's taxpayer does not want to pay for another Japan or Germany, and some people in Washington have sold him the unicorn of "instant happiness once the bad guy is removed with a few skilled operators and cool tech" (aka COIN), ignoring decades of history.
Either the American taxpayer needs to push for colonialism (call a spade a spade), or it needs to accept that furthering US interests will create side effects for locals. The latter is obviously a lot easier to stomach, especially with free speech allowing comfortable, safe civilians to complain loudly about how unfair it all is, so it has been the default position of successive administrations since Johnson. Option 3 is to accept the occasional bombing and attack on your civilians, in exchange for isolationism. The risk of that option is well described by the example of Chamberlain in the 1930s.
Here are a couple of clarifying notes to the essay:
1) the United States has not declared any wars. The last war we were in was in the 1940s, over 70 years ago. Since then we've done "police actions" "limited military engagements", and all sorts of other nonsense, but no wars.
2) Yes, there's too much emphasis on the wrong things. But there's a huge problem here that the military is working through: what do you want your military to do, anyway? The general consensus is that we want these highly-sophisticated fighting units able to take a fight to other highly-sophisticated militaries, like the Russians or the Chinese. But guess what? That's not the fight we've had.
So we keep spending trillions of dollars for a military built to do one thing, and then we keep asking it to do something else. You might think the answer would be "Just re-factor!", but it's not. As it turns out, if you want B2 stealth bombers, you gotta have this huge industrial complex churning away for decades to get them. You can't just turn it off and on. If there's ever a fight requiring high-tech military versus high-tech military, all of that prep will pay off. If there isn't? It still might have been worth it -- having it in place could have prevented the fight. You don't know.
The real problem is that the Pentagon and various administrations are unable to have an honest discussion about the issues. There are too many lucrative contracts and jobs on the table. The risks are too great to boil down into slogans.
For now, my recommendation is to form a new branch of service dedicate solely to large numbers of low-tech groud-pounders who specialize in nation-building and international rescue/response. Whether we like it or not, that's what we keep ending up doing, and the existing services do not seem to be able to mentally make the trade between one bomber and, say, 100K peacekeepers. Plus the missions are vastly different.
The military strategist Thomas Barnett has an interesting (and entertaining) TED talk where he described two different functions the US military needs to fulfill. It responds well to the criticisms presented in this article.
The first: the Leviathan force. This is the military as we know it. Go in an break stuff quickly and thoroughly. Staffed by slightly pissed off, gung-ho young Americans. We're already pretty good at this.
The second: the Systems Administrator. Go into a broken country (by us or otherwise) and 'wage peace'. Help build governments, keep peace, develop social services, etc. Staffed by older, more experienced individuals from a variety of fields who are not (primarily) front-line soldiers. We don't know how to do this.
[+] [-] orbifold|11 years ago|reply
What I find worrying is that the War on Terror is a poor substitute for the Cold War. The enemy is technologically unsophisticated, so there is no chance of a sputnik shock, no real competition to gain the upper hand technologically and therefore potentially less incentive to use the vast resources of the military to fund high technology research as it was the case during the Cold War.
Moreover the technology developed to "hunt terrorists" can be turned against the population much more easily than the rockets, nuclear weapons and computer systems of the past.
[+] [-] angersock|11 years ago|reply
You've hit on it in a nutshell, I think.
The entire War on Terror is predicated upon the idea that a) we must ferret out and neutralize threats before they manifest and b) we must occupy regions which may generate threats.
Those two policies directly manifest in the development of advanced surveillance and techniques of oppression. Even more sickeningly, there is no way of proving it wrong: if something bad happens, the answer is to increase efforts; and if nothing bad happens, the answer is not to cutback the defenses that presumably prevented that nothing.
We're doomed.
[+] [-] wahsd|11 years ago|reply
THAT's the name of the game. Stealing public money to enrich private individuals. As long as there is an incentive to manipulate America into blowing our money and efforts on military boondoggles, we will do exactly that.
[+] [-] baddox|11 years ago|reply
It's funneling trillions of dollars into military contractors.
[+] [-] api|11 years ago|reply
This is called military Keynesianism. It's how you can sell Keynesian economics in conservative societies that oppose anything resembling "social" spending. Since it's somehow not wasteful or "socialist" to funnel unlimited stimulus money through the defense budget, that's where it gets funneled.
The catch is that you have to have a war somewhere to keep justifying it.
[+] [-] Theodores|11 years ago|reply
For my money the century of mechanised was has been about taking money out of the economy and into the arms-trade. This shows up as GDP and is therefore a good thing but it is at the expense of things like schools and hospitals. Government borrowing has been at record levels during the 'terror' years, government spending on weapons has been at an all time high. The money gets borrowed from the banks that the politicians know so well. It is a virtuous cycle for them but not us even if that is what they say.
[+] [-] cnp|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] e12e|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] dreamweapon|11 years ago|reply
As good a synopsis of the last 60 years of this country's foreign policy, as any.
[+] [-] stevenjohns|11 years ago|reply
The paragraph itself seems slightly misleading or enhanced for dramatic effect. If this situation did actually take place as claimed, it's likely that the locals were intentionally trying to confuse the interpreter.
[+] [-] smacktoward|11 years ago|reply
I suspect part of the reason for this that the article doesn't touch on is the idea of the rotation. Combat units don't see themselves as being stationed in Iraq "for the duration," but as units that happen to be in Iraq today but could be in Afghanistan tomorrow and Korea the day after that. What's the benefit of learning Pashto today if you're leaving Afghanistan in three months and may never rotate back there again?
[+] [-] Htsthbjig|11 years ago|reply
Americans live in their own isolated world. If you understand the culture you don't need to make the war or could reduce it to the minimum.
E.g. In the first Gulf war the Americans told the population to go against Saddam because they were to enter Iraq. A significant part of the people did.
But Americans left betraying those who had supported them. Repression by Sadam was terrible, over a million people died. Americans couldn't care less about them.
This action alone meant USA was never going to be trusted again in Iraq because families don't forget the betrayal, and never will until the widow of the man who was tortured and killed for helping Americans is alive.
Another example is how the Americans burned poppy fields in Afghanistan while not replacing it with anything that could make the families live.
Helping people growing food puts families on your side.
I had been in safe places of Afganistan and Iraq. The people there prefer non Americans like British army because they have much more experience helping native communities, and understand their culture much better.
[+] [-] VLM|11 years ago|reply
Back in '01, had a .mil security clearance in the 90s and was dumb enough to think I could learn Arabic as kind of a moonlighting job, that dotcom bubble wasn't looking so hot anymore, but, why bother, just like the first gulf war we'll be outta there in less than a year so I won't have enough time to learn Arabic. That being 14 years ago...
An interesting startup idea would be shaking up existing translation services. It would be difficult and non-trivial. Ideal startup field!
[+] [-] crdb|11 years ago|reply
At the negotiating table with a leader from a neutral local faction, his interpreter, who was sympathetic to the enemy, was changing the meaning of everything said to make the negotiations fail. After letting the charade go on for a while, great-uncle spoke up in the local dialect to the great surprise of both the interpreter and the other party, which resulted in one less living interpreter and one more alliance for the French.
[+] [-] myth_buster|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pluma|11 years ago|reply
The ongoing "wars" in Iraq and Afghanistan (which miraculously have been "ended" unilaterally by the US many times over) aren't wars. They're garrisons.
Even ISIS (ISIL?) isn't a conventional enemy, despite having tanks. These aren't nation states and those aren't, for the most part, soldiers.
The reason the "War on Terror" is still treated as a war is that there is no reason not to. The article explains that quite nicely.
[+] [-] adam77|11 years ago|reply
...is for its legal status (empowering the US executive to carry out certain actions it otherwise couldn't).
A number of laws were changed/reinterpreted following 9/11 with respect to what constitutes war and how it may be implemented.
[+] [-] st0p|11 years ago|reply
The Vietnam war started 60 years ago. The US military still struggles with the same guerilla tactics as in 1955.
[+] [-] voidlogic|11 years ago|reply
But I think the premise: "the World’s Biggest Military Keeps Losing Wars", is wrong.
1. Conventional forces have trouble wining asymmetrical conflicts unless they are allowed to wage total war (which is usually precluded by modern political/moral concerns). Nothing new here- the Romans had experience with this.
1.A Note the single "win" on the list of post-Korea conflicts was the first Gulf War, a conventional conflict.
1.B It is arguable that the U.S. is actually better than most other conventional militaries at asymmetrical warfare: http://www.warriorlodge.com/blogs/news/16298760-a-french-sol..., however that may just be a product of being better at conventional warfare improving overall fitness.
2. "Winning" define this? Winning means very different things in total war vs. occupation/garrison/nation building actions. While its fair to say the U.S. lost Vietnam, I think its fair to say the U.S. won in Iraq and Afghanistan as they are now governed by friendly democracies... Military action is just a way of attempting to physically impose political will- If a nation's military helps the leaders reach their goals, it won.
[+] [-] dcposch|11 years ago|reply
No. Iraq is fractured into halves. The northern half is controlled by ISIS, the southern by a dysfunction democracy where the elections are not about ideas and policies, but rather about Sunnis vs Shiites. Afghanistan is also sectarian. Neither are anything we'd recognize as free and stable democracies. In a lot of ways, ordinary citizens in both places are worse off than before the wars.
Our wars there were brutal, protracted, expensive, and ultimately didn't work.
[+] [-] blisterpeanuts|11 years ago|reply
Of course, the Pakistanis continued to fund and arm these guys so they came back. That was a political failure rather than a military one. Had the U.S. military been allowed, they would have followed the Taliban across the border. As it is, U.S. drone attacks regularly harry the Taliban in Waziristan and prevent them from regrouping.
Now, Iraq, that was a wrong headed conflict from 1991 on. It would have been preferable to leave Saddam in power, vile though he was. Al Qaeda might still have destabilized his country, but the Sunni tribesmen were loyal to him and would not have turned as they did when the Americans had taken over.
[+] [-] quanticle|11 years ago|reply
I dispute that Iraq is governed by a friendly democracy. Iraq, presently is largely split between the Islamic State and the post-Saddam regime currently headed by Haider El-Abadi. Neither is especially friendly towards the US at this point. Islamic State is... well, Islamic State. The Abadi administration, on the other hand, has largely fallen into the orbit of Iran, owing to their shared Shia Islam heritage.
The outcome of the Iraq War reminds me of the old joke about the French and Indian War. "Who won the French and Indian war? It was the British." Likewise, "Who won the America/Iraq war? The Iranians."
[+] [-] Elhana|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] venomsnake|11 years ago|reply
With wins like these, who needs loses. The US army and state department failed to deliver tangible political product. End of story. Both places are a total mess and the world is more dangerous because of that.
You can lose a war, without losing a single combat, if you fail to deliver on your objectives.
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] leroy_masochist|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] carsongross|11 years ago|reply
Bill Lind has done some deep thinking on why the US military can't win modern wars (tldr: the armed forces are a graft system, not a war system; no one has figured out how to fight non-state and semi-state wars without going full roman burn-and-crucify.)
I highly recommend his articles and books, particularly to people on the left who might be initially put off by his social conservatism.
[+] [-] Kalium|11 years ago|reply
This is the key factor, right here. We do know how to win these wars. It just requires things we are not willing to accept.
[+] [-] wahsd|11 years ago|reply
If anyone had any interest in preventing our warmongering, they would look at changing the incentive structure that surges towards war and death and killing and supporting despotic foreign dictators and shelters horrible people who do horrible things in our own country. As long as we want to condemn foreigners while giving immunity to degenerate f!@#-ups like Rumsfeld and the whole Bush administration, there is nothing more that can be done. They should have all been thrown alive in a grinder and turned into pig feed for the high treason of deliberately and knowingly lying to America and the world and starting wars that killed Americans for no reason. We are a hollow farce if we can't apply the same Nuremberg Trial precedent to our own leaders.
[+] [-] maxxxxx|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] netcan|11 years ago|reply
Suppose an Arab military force was currently bringing peace and freedom to the oil-rich, violence-torn country of Texas. What would they be reading in the Arab newspapers five years after the occupation of Texas?
They’d be learning about the minute doctrinal differences and the irreconcilable rivalries between Catholic Hispanics and Protestant anglos, and even between Southern Methodists and Southern Baptists. They’d all know about Texas’s long love affair with guns, explaining why Texans were killing Arab soldiers. They’d constantly be reminded that the dominant minority in east Texas is African-American, while in west Texas it is Hispanic.
Everybody in the Arab world would know far more about Texas than any sane non-Texan should ever want to know — without understanding anything at all.
If you don't understand, it's dangerous to convince yourself you do.
[+] [-] matthewowen|11 years ago|reply
Really? I feel like there's a decent case for the War of 1812 (the USA attempted to seize Canada and failed).
[+] [-] ww520|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AcerbicZero|11 years ago|reply
So depending on how you want to view the Civil War, the US was 6-0-1, or 5-0-2, until Vietnam.
[+] [-] johnnyfaehell|11 years ago|reply
hat then happened was what is commonly known as peacekeeping. They then got hammered by what is commonly known as terrorist using guerrilla warfare. Even then, not like they lost.
I'm all up for bashing America, but let's not bash them for not carpet bombing a bunch of civilians.
[+] [-] amyjess|11 years ago|reply
In Iraq, we won the war hands-down. We went in to effect regime change and bring Saddam to justice. We did exactly that. We toppled Saddam's regime, established a new one in its place, and then captured and executed the man himself.
However, we lost the peace badly. We failed to anticipate the rebels, the influx of al-Qaeda, the sectarian civil war, the rise of ISIS, etc.
[+] [-] discardorama|11 years ago|reply
The British were able to control vast swaths of the world with minimal military power. They fought smart.
I remember watching Restrepo and other similar documentaries. I come from a tribal culture too; and there were several instances where I could clearly see how the Americans were making a mistake in their dealing with the locals. Those people have been living and dying by their tribal codes for millennia, and "democracy" and "freedom" means nothing to them.
Minor nitpick: it was GHW Bush who committed US troops to Somalia, just as he was leaving office, in December 1992; a nice welcoming present for Clinton.
Edited: It was pappy Bush, not Dubya. Thanks @theorique :)
[+] [-] lordnacho|11 years ago|reply
And because you think it will be easy, you are more likely to gamble on that marginal gain.
And because the gain is only marginal, you don't want to lose any troops.
And since you don't want to really bet those lives, it's harder to win.
[+] [-] jdietrich|11 years ago|reply
During the exercises, the red leader (Lt. Gen. Paul van Riper) used asymmetric warfare strategies, designed to exploit weaknesses in US military doctrine. Rather than using radio and risking eavesdropping, orders were sent via motorcycle courier and signal lamps. Rather than squaring up along battlelines, the red team used hit-and-run attacks, including suicide bombings. After massive losses for the blue team, the exercise was reset and the red leader was ordered to follow a preordained script to ensure a blue victory. The exercise was deemed a complete success.
The US military learned absolutely nothing from this exercise, and continued to make exactly the same mistakes in Iraq and Afghanistan. There is a doctrinal belief in the 'correct' way to win a war, and the notion that technological and logistical advantages can guarantee victory in any conflict. US military strategy is designed to justify procurement decisions post-hoc, rather than actually win wars. We invest heavily in eavesdropping infrastructure, therefore it is strategically invaluable. We have a fleet of multirole fighters, therefore air supremacy is a vital objective. There is an ideological drive to transform all warfare into the bloodless technological dispute of the cold war, regardless of reality.
To quote Lt. Gen. van Riper:
"My experience has been that those who focus on the technology, the science, tend towards sloganeering. There's very little intellectual content to what they say, and they use slogans in place of this intellectual content. It does a great disservice to the American military, the American defense establishment. 'Information dominance,' 'network-centric warfare,' 'focused logistics'—you could fill a book with all of these slogans.
What I see are slogans masquerading as ideas. In a sense, they make war more antiseptic. They make it more like a machine. They don't understand it's a terrible, uncertain, chaotic, bloody business. So they can lead us the wrong way. They can cause people not to understand this terrible, terrible phenomenon."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002 http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/military/immutable-nature-war.h...
[+] [-] niels_olson|11 years ago|reply
"I am afraid the machinery of war is to far gone for any of it to make a difference."
That sentence will ring in my ears for the rest of my life.
[+] [-] hackuser|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacques_foccart|11 years ago|reply
The wars were total wars, won at the cost of millions of lives and financial and industrial commitments that reshaped the culture of both nations, at enormous civilian costs especially on the losing side (Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima...) and the territory kept at peace via millions of boots on the ground, enormous military effort (how much does Okinawa cost per annum?) and enormous financial spending, justified by Pax Americana being presumably worth more than its bill. In the case of WWI, not invading the losing power after breaking its will to fight resulted in a worse war a couple decades later.
Another unpalatable and often glossed over fact is that in both Germany and Japan, middle management was kept in power because the invading authority (such as MacArthur) realised that chaos would follow otherwise, and that in a statist, single-party state, all the talent would converge to the ruling party anyway.
Today's taxpayer does not want to pay for another Japan or Germany, and some people in Washington have sold him the unicorn of "instant happiness once the bad guy is removed with a few skilled operators and cool tech" (aka COIN), ignoring decades of history.
Either the American taxpayer needs to push for colonialism (call a spade a spade), or it needs to accept that furthering US interests will create side effects for locals. The latter is obviously a lot easier to stomach, especially with free speech allowing comfortable, safe civilians to complain loudly about how unfair it all is, so it has been the default position of successive administrations since Johnson. Option 3 is to accept the occasional bombing and attack on your civilians, in exchange for isolationism. The risk of that option is well described by the example of Chamberlain in the 1930s.
[+] [-] DanielBMarkham|11 years ago|reply
1) the United States has not declared any wars. The last war we were in was in the 1940s, over 70 years ago. Since then we've done "police actions" "limited military engagements", and all sorts of other nonsense, but no wars.
2) Yes, there's too much emphasis on the wrong things. But there's a huge problem here that the military is working through: what do you want your military to do, anyway? The general consensus is that we want these highly-sophisticated fighting units able to take a fight to other highly-sophisticated militaries, like the Russians or the Chinese. But guess what? That's not the fight we've had.
So we keep spending trillions of dollars for a military built to do one thing, and then we keep asking it to do something else. You might think the answer would be "Just re-factor!", but it's not. As it turns out, if you want B2 stealth bombers, you gotta have this huge industrial complex churning away for decades to get them. You can't just turn it off and on. If there's ever a fight requiring high-tech military versus high-tech military, all of that prep will pay off. If there isn't? It still might have been worth it -- having it in place could have prevented the fight. You don't know.
The real problem is that the Pentagon and various administrations are unable to have an honest discussion about the issues. There are too many lucrative contracts and jobs on the table. The risks are too great to boil down into slogans.
For now, my recommendation is to form a new branch of service dedicate solely to large numbers of low-tech groud-pounders who specialize in nation-building and international rescue/response. Whether we like it or not, that's what we keep ending up doing, and the existing services do not seem to be able to mentally make the trade between one bomber and, say, 100K peacekeepers. Plus the missions are vastly different.
[+] [-] dominotw|11 years ago|reply
http://www.netflix.com/WiPlayer?movieid=80017023&trkid=13752...
I gained a whole new prespective on the war
[+] [-] dennisgorelik|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] germinalphrase|11 years ago|reply
The first: the Leviathan force. This is the military as we know it. Go in an break stuff quickly and thoroughly. Staffed by slightly pissed off, gung-ho young Americans. We're already pretty good at this.
The second: the Systems Administrator. Go into a broken country (by us or otherwise) and 'wage peace'. Help build governments, keep peace, develop social services, etc. Staffed by older, more experienced individuals from a variety of fields who are not (primarily) front-line soldiers. We don't know how to do this.
Link:www.ted.com/talks/thomas_barnett_draws_a_new_map_for_peace