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.
Usually, I would say that we just have to wait for some sort of wake up call, something the US government fucks up so incredibly that anything involving surveillance of an innocent populace is a poison pill.
But we've already had the Snowden leaks, and if that wasn't a wake up call, I don't know what else could be.
The next logical step is death squads, drone surveillance (and strikes?) and kidnappings on US soil, not just abroad. I hope it won't come to that, but I fear it will. Maybe not until 2050 or so, though.
Judging by current operations abroad, and historic evidence, like who and how Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC) (Nee School of Americas) have been training and for what, things like COINTELPRO -- things are looking grim.
[ed: not to mention the lack of consequences from Snowden and the CIA torture report -- there doesn't appear to be even a thin veneer of acountability left.]
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.
The "wars" and the militarism is essentially just a tool to extract ever more money from the government, the economy, and tax payers in order to funnel them to wards the power brokers.
It's a kind of scam similar to a multilevel marketing scheme, which is quite similar to a run of the mill ponzi scam and quite similar to a simple protection racket. In case you don't know what a con job is, it is shorthand for "confidence trick", a type of scam where fostered confidence is manipulated in order to gain unfettered access to the direct target of the scheme, which is usually money.
In the case of war, the multilevel marketing scheme con job is all about fostering confidence in the military protecting us and our children from all kinds of bad guys. The problem though, as the military services sector and America quickly realized after the fall of the Soviet Union, is that you cannot justify your target handing over their earnings and writing over their assets if there is nothing to be scared and the bad guy just keeled over. If you remember or were paying attention during the 90s, you will recall that beyond the almost desperate nature of agitation to attack Iraq and Saddam (which also has its own illustrious history of lies and false flag type incidents), there was serious angst about how our military would justify unjustifiable expenditure into the foreseeable future. There was serious identity crisis in the late 90s military services sector. 9/11 was the like a huge birthday cake with all the icing already on top of it they could have ever wished for and the Al Qaeda colluding buffoons in the White House at the time were just the stripper jumping out of the cake.
The scary thing about it is that our government and our wealthy and out military services sector essentially dropped a gasoline bladder on a camp fire, instead of covering it with dirt and water; but will they be able to tame the demons they have let out and even if they can, will it not have contributed to draining our attention and resources from developing and building our own society to compete in the future instead of being mired in battles with primitive mindsets.
Personally, I think it will once be written that the USA was a short lived power that succumbed to internal saboteurs that drove the USA off a cliff for selfish greed and allowed it to be overtaken by the more focused and deliberate China. We have always been our own worst enemy.
Were does the US military budget money get spent? A small portion goes on wages, but every soldier needs equipment, food, and requires infrastructure. This is mostly provided by private companies. "Defence" companies are in the top lobbyists by expenditure, at about $200M each per year. They lobby hard to get the lucrative contracts to provide all the above and more (e.g. the F-35 program).
Who pays for all this? The government of course. And where does the government get its money? The tax payers. I.e. the public.
So the reasoning goes that the industrial military complex exists to transfer money from the public, via the government, to private companies.
Actual expenses in 2012 show that military pay and benefits accounts for 34.6% of the DoD budget, with total pay and benefits (including civilian) accounting for 47.8%. According to a CBO report I read in 2010, the growth in personnel costs for the military was one of the biggest concerns for long term budget planning. The vast majority of the military servicemen costs are due to the cost of providing healthcare, because the military isn't exempt or immune to the cost growth experienced in that sector.
As an additional aside, expected outlays for the post-9/11 GI bill are much higher than initial estimates because the cost of college has grown so much and the benefits are transferrable.
Given your definition of "spending other people's money on something that doesn't benefit them or their [idealized notions of] society", this fits far more in the camp of conservative wordplay. Liberals--at least according to the US conservative political narrative--love to "steal" other people's money to spend it on something that doesn't benefit them directly. Or so the conservatives charge. It is rare--if even that frequently--to hear American liberals refer to the spending of public money as "theft" in public discourse.
But there's part of it that goes back to the economy. Think the Internet, GPS, early Silicon Valley and early Texas tech hubs. Of course, that was privatized and state sponsored research turned into cash cows for the private sector. Even some big names like Google and Facebook had seed money from state-related groups.
It's got to lie in creating consequences and re-associating incentives. As long as war makes people rich, it will be perpetuated and we will squander money that could have led us to far better outcomes.
With wealth and income disparity becoming so hugely imbalanced, I expect things to only get worse though. Wealth and income disparity only exasperates the motivation to manipulating the system to thrust us into war and military spending, it's a positive feedback loop. Unfortunately, positive feedback loops are rarely, without deliberate action, halted prior to leading to disaster.
Who are generally required by law to spend most of those dollars on American salaries and American-made products. Thus funneling them into the economy.
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway.
We pay for a single fighter with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.
This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
These plain and cruel truths define the peril and point the hope that come with this spring of 1953."
-Dwight D. Eisenhower, in his "Chance for Peace" speech
No one said it was a good or efficient jobs and stimulus program. That however doesn't change the fact that it is a jobs and stimulus program. This is most evident when looking at local politicians when a specific program is potentially being shutdown. They will fight tooth and nail regardless of the strategic necessity of the program just so they can keep the local jobs and money that that program provides.
A certain pedantry forces me to point out: Listening to the speech at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzNbfa1QyYg, I find there are two discrepancies from this transcript: "fighter" should read "fighter plane", and "This, I repeat, is" should read "This is, I repeat,".
My apologies. At last, the record is set straight!
Yes, that's why a huge proportion of US gov't expenditures are for entitlements. If we're trying our best not to hand out money to citizens, we're doing a pretty bad job.
In general, I agree, but for every destroyer built, how many dock workers wound up being able to buy one of those houses with their salary? It offsets the problem, at least somewhat.
That doesn't change the calculus because the offset applies equally to both sides. Suppose you had paid the workers the same amount to build schools instead. They would still be able to buy houses with their salaries, but now there would also be a bunch of nice new schools.
I think the problem is we need to reach world stability. Look at Europe and Japan --economies which had invested relatively little into militaries, they are both reconsidering their previous position due to mainly two factors, the US disengaging, relatively speaking, and a perceived (and by perceived i don't mean imagined) threat from strengthening militaries in Russia and China, which given Europe and Japans previous dependence on the US left them in a era position to respond to growing threats.
This hits on honestly the only regret I have with the recent military history of the US. I don't mind that we spend $150 million on "warp speed death machines". I do mind that we spend some of that in the name of protecting countries which are perfectly capable of protecting themselves. Assisting allied forces with our own is fine; replacing them is not.
Sure, but it's hard to argue that it is a better result than if you paid those same dock workers for building schools, out of that same government money, or if instead of a destroyer they were housing a fleet of cargo ships used for commerce. In the best possible case, seeing military spending as economic stimulus amounts to "we will use the fear our citizens have of other people to institute backdoor and inefficient redistribution and science research programs; because we failed at getting them to consent to fund those same goals directly out of care for others."
Of course, this assumes economic stimulus is really the main reason for military spending, which is probably not how the people in charge of these programs see it.
If you really want to blow your mind/weep uncontrollably a little bit of math is just the ticket.
The F-22 costs $150,000,000 per plane [1]. The price of a bushel of wheat is $6.52 [2]. This means that a single F-22 costs ~23,006,134 bushels of wheat.
A bushel of wheat can produce ~100 loaves of bread weighing 1.5lbs each [3], meaning that each F-22 costs ~2,300,613,496 loaves of bread.
The US military has built 187 F-22 planes [1], meaning that it has exchanged the ability to create 430,214,723,926 loaves of bread for a warp speed death machine. Put another way, the US military could provide a loaf of bread to every man, woman, and child on this planet(!) once per week for 62 weeks for the same price as its fleet of F-22s.
The next time someone talks about world hunger as some sort of intractable problem, just remember that we are actively choosing to allow people to starve and die in order to build ever more efficient death machines.
-The cost to produce a loaf of bread is $0 above the raw wheat cost
-The cost to distribute a loaf of bread to all of humanity is $0
-A loaf of bread is sufficient to healthily sustain a starving person
I mean yeah, even if the final number was 20% of your "math", it would be a lot of bread. But the answer to world hunger isn't "let's take all the F-22 money and use it to make bread!"
63 weeks is a little over a year. Considering the exponential population growth in the developing world, this number would be already smaller next year.
I am not particularly huge fan of military development, but it would at least advance mankind, just giving away free bread will only move it closer to the doom.
I understand the point you're trying to make but unfortunately it isn't an accurate comparison. However, I do think you've got something here because I question whether building F-22s at $150mil per plane plus the costs of armament exceeds the cost of feeding and arming the populaces as well as training them to defend themselves against groups like the Taliban and ISIS. I would also add in the nominal (it isn't expensive to educate people) cost of education on religions and basic human rights to help prevent the spread of radicalization.
I'd wager that it is far less expensive to do this than to build planes to attack an enemy where the costs of these planes is not conducive at all to the value of destroying this enemy and obliterating any progress towards paying off our debt.
Thank you for the reply. Although my last sentence was probably unnecessarily combative, I hope that people reading this don't get hung up on that, how exact the math is, or how much nutrition a loaf of bread can truly provide. I mean I just looked at the cost of building the active fleet. Wikipedia estimates the total costs of the program as being roughly 4x that cost, so even taking into account the costs of a loaf of bread beyond wheat I bet that feeding the planet (with bread) for a year is still pretty close to the cost of the program.
You got what I was hoping people would take away, which is that we look at groups around the world being radicalized, turning to oppressive religion and wonder "why? what makes them do that?", and maybe one piece of the puzzle would be asking what sort of reaction these people would have if we gave everyone in their nation food for a year instead of taking a large portion of the world's total resources and expending it on war machines which we then use in their homeland.
I get your intent, but there's also the political problem in a democracy.
How hard is it to convince a majority of people that buying more death machines is a good use of their money?
Now how hard to convince a majority that feeding the world is a good use?
Now how hard to convince them that building schools is a good use?
I'll just remark that the answer to that last is why Afghanistan was controlled by the Taliban in the first place (after the warlords the US supported bickered amongst each other for a while).
That does require that F-22 fighters are fungible with wheat production. It's possible that at the margin wheat productivity will be far less than the average price of wheat -- that is, that you'll have less productivity.
But yes, it's a tremendous expenditure of treasury.
Paddy rice is a substantially higher labor crop than mechanization-friendly wheat production per calorie, and China eats about as much wheat as it does rice; It grows even more maize, but this is mostly as feed.
Actually, people can't eat money. Money can buy things, but if you change the allocation of money, you change the price of things as well, so linear calculations like "with this amount of money, and math" do not necessarily work out very realistically.
On the other hand, there is already much more than enough food in the world - at least so far, despite huge population growth - so the problem is not that the world would need more food; the problem is allocation and distribution of food. Shortly, lack of market access.
And most big famines are not even about people not being able to afford food as such; they are political.
From your example, Apollo, I'll jump to another example: the best-known modern famine in Ethiopia, 1983-1985. There was local drought in northern Ethiopia, but the government was actually exporting food. The government extracted food from producers so that they themselves had to buy their own food, and at the same time the same government restricted the movement of people.
There was plenty of aid sent, but it was sent to the government that had partially caused the hunger in the first place.
In 1985, Ethiopia had a population of 41 million. Now it has a population of 88 million. And they are not particularly hungry, and this does not even require a lot of money from the Apollo program. But it requires more stable political circumstances in Ethiopia (and things have looked somewhat better after the Soviet-backet government fell in 1991).
You know, I'm a big space exploration geek, but, over the years, I've come to see a lot of it as money not well spent. Again, I'm a space geek, amateur astronomer, follower of Nasa's and ESA's missions, but, in the end, some of the stuff will just cost too much for not much reward. Sometimes I'm still on the fence though.
If you want some possibly-far-fetched but very high-ROI space investment strategies, have you seen the Phil Metzger et al proposal for rapid bootstrapping of space industry[1][2]? Even if off by orders of magnitude it would still dwarf the industrial output of the world within a few decades.
The F-22 is likely one amazing airplane.
If we in the US don't need the F-22, then
it's way too expensive. If we do need it,
then it's maybe quite cheap.
In a sense, we can suspect that, if the F-22
is never used, then maybe it has, thus, done
its best possible work -- would be enemies
were afraid to attack us where the F-22 could
ruin their attack.
Could a plane far ahead of its candidate
opponents do that well at avoiding a war?
Under some fairly realistic circumstances, yes.
Suppose for the sake of the argument, we assume
that the US should have fought Gulf War I
(I tend to think so, e.g., Kuwait was invaded
and Saudi Arabia was next on Saddam's
hit list; Gulf War II, hmm ...? YMMV). So,
with this assumption, in Baghdad Saddam had
spent a huge bundle on anti-aircraft means --
radars, guns, and missiles. Okay. Sorry,
Saddam, for all those millions, you didn't get
10 cents worth. Why? Because Lockheed had
developed the F-117, and it flew into the
Baghdad anti-aircraft means and supposedly
never got even a single scratch.
Lesson: Given the assumption that Gulf War I
was to be fought, we really, really like
the F-117.
The F-22? No doubt there are scenarios where
its superiority would be similar.
Broadly it appears that the US has military
planners sitting around evaluating what
potential enemies might be able to do and, then,
coming up with military R&D programs to
keep the US ahead. Then, if the stuff the
US develops is sufficiently superior, say,
like the F-117 or the SR-71,
then the chances of actual shooting go way down
and the superior US weapons in effect
did the best we could hope for.
Now, for the cost of an F-22, likely that
is heavily for just its crucial attribute --
being way ahead as technology. So, pay
super big bucks for the F-22 #1 and much
less for #2, #3, .... Or, what's crucial
about the F-22 is not that we have built
some airplanes but that we have
created some highly superior technology,
that gets used in some real airplanes.
Or the F-22 is part of a technology race
where, like for the F-117, the US wants
to win, against any and all competition.
I hope we do.
Uh, in Gulf War I, Saddam's planes? Soon
enough they saw that getting off the
ground and heading to the Americans
was a fast way to a smoking hole and, thus,
just took the back way to Iran and parked.
Not a chance. Saddam's planes didn't
have a chance.
In Gulf War I, supposedly the US had
more injuries from rest and recreation
than from enemy action. Now if we have
to fight a war, then that's how we want
to fight it.
Or, once General Schwarzkopf
was asked what happened to those
many thousands of Iraqi
soldiers out in the Iraqi desert
defending against an attack from
Saudi Arabia? The answer: "They
are still there.".
Uh, there was one more: Saddam had
a lot of Russian tanks. Maybe
they were really good tanks, maybe
tough and rugged. Their gun could
shoot a mile. Ah, but then there
was the US tank: Also tough and
rugged, likely more so than for the
Russian tanks.
With a gas turbine engine
to permit especially fast speed
for a tank.
Then we get to the really good stuff:
(a)
The US tank could see through dust,
fog, and in the dark (infrared, etc.).
(b) The gun on the US tank could
shoot 2 miles. (c) The US tank
could shoot while moving while
the Russian tank had to stop to shoot.
Hmm (a)-(c) -- guess what happened
in the US-Iraqi tank battles? Remember
that the Iraqi tank could shoot only
1 mile, and the US tank could shoot twice
that far. So, by the time an Iraqi tank
was in range to shoot, it was already dead.
So, how'd the US tanks be so much better?
Sure: Technology. Much of the cost of
the US tanks? Technology R&D and not
just metal work.
The movie buff in me enjoys the fact that a lot of this can be summed up with 2 quotes from Iron Man 1.
"Tony Stark: Well, Ms. Brown. It's an imperfect world, but it's the only one we got. I guarantee you the day weapons are no longer needed to keep the peace, I'll start making bricks and beams for baby hospitals."
and
"Tony Stark: They say that the best weapon is the one you never have to fire. I respectfully disagree. I prefer the weapon you only have to fire once. That's how Dad did it, that's how America does it, and it's worked out pretty well so far."
The R&D costs far exceed the actual production costs and on a side note it is interesting and pleasing that lots of this R&D eventually makes its way into consumer products likewise how technology from racing (esp. Formula 1) makes its way into consumer vehicles as well.
That being said, another way to win a war against a technologically superior foe is just as the article suggests, being willing and able to win the battle of attrition. Example: U.S. Sherman tanks vs. German Panzers and Tigers. However, it is our unwillingness to sacrifice lives that has led to these R&D breakthroughs so one could argue that we have in fact won by finding ways not to lose. Although, just like what the article states, if we lose a war because we're not willing to win the war through attrition then the war didn't serve any real purpose at all.
Let's communicate more clearly than the OP did: The
US could have won in Iraq in Gulf War I and II and
in Afghanistan. How? Kill everyone who resisted.
How? That's the strange part: For US military
technology, killing lots of people is nearly as easy
as pushing some buttons. E.g., an Iraqi officer was
amazed -- praise from an adversary is especially welcome:
There was an Iraqi tank parked tightly between
two buildings, and the US put a missile on the
tank, destroyed it, and didn't hit either of the
buildings. The officer said: "American military
technology is beyond belief". Well, it was to him.
The biggie point was, the US didn't want to kill that
many people in Iraq or Afghanistan. Instead a main
goal was to help them get a good constitution, elections,
elected government, government of laws instead of
something else, freedom of speech, the press, assembly,
religion, have well trained police,
etc.,
roads, schools, hospitals,
move into the 20th, maybe the 21st century, become
a good member of the nations of the world,
etc.
Why that goal? Because the US does not want to
be seen as an imperialist or colonial power
or an occupying force. Instead US policy
since WWII has been to help US security
by having other countries be democratic
with strong economies hoping that that combination
will keep down shooting.
Indeed, after Gulf War II, W was against
doing a lot to occupy and govern Iraq and, instead,
stated that
"The Iraqi people are perfectly capable of
governing themselves." Well, not exactly
"perfectly"; maybe after some civil wars, etc.
Well, for the cases the OP mentioned, that
US goal of democracy, etc. flopped.
Why flopped? In both cases, Islam had more power
to run the place than anything the US brought
unless the US just killed a lot more people,
likely most of the Mullahs. The US didn't want
to do that. Could the US have done that? Sure:
Easily. Just push some buttons. Trivial.
But would also kill a lot of dogs, cats,
women, children, peaceful people, etc., say,
like the US did in WWII fire bombing cities
in Germany and Japan, or, say, like
Germany did in their bombing of London,
Warsaw, etc.
Actually one broad lesson is that actually
freedom of speech, the press, assembly, religion,
etc. is often much less welcome, sometimes
even in the US,
than the
US founding fathers assumed!
The core of such freedoms is that
people need not conform. Alas, a too
common response to differences
from such freedoms
is to pull a trigger or plant a bomb.
Saddam said that we'd have a heck of a time
keeping Iraq together -- we're learning that
now. Saddam did keep the place together, but
he borrowed from the Stalin playbook. The US
thought that that was cruel -- it is. But
maybe more Iraqis have died per month since
Gulf War II or I than before it.
Maybe what Joe Biden often said would be the
right stuff -- partition the place into
separate regions for Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds.
With some irony, one interpretation of what
is going on now is just that.
In Iraq and Afghanistan, the Mullahs are
not much afraid of US weapons because
they know that the US would be reluctant
to kill enough Afghans to make those weapons
defeat the Mullahs.
But for someone like a Saddam who wants
to have a big army, air force, etc.
and invade their neighbors, as in Gulf War I,
the US can win in six weeks of bombing and
100 hours on the ground.
For any country that wants to use nuclear
weapons, the US still is awash in
weapons only "have to use once".
In Viet Nam, the situation was similar but
otherwise somewhat different: The US
could never find anyone to support in Saigon
who could also get enough support of
the people of South Viet Nam.
But in Viet Nam, the US could have won there,
too: Just be willing to kill a lot more
people. Sadly, a lot more, even a lot
more than we did kill, which was
sad enough.
When my HP laser printer quit,
I got a Brother printer. It's terrific,
and it's made in Viet Nam. Good for
Viet Nam.
I never understood just why the US
had so much trouble in Viet Nam:
We should have been able to have
sat down with Ho and cut a deal:
The US will give you a lot of stuff,
darned near anything you could want
in products, technology, universities,
medical care, development loans,
roads, bridges,
hydroelectric facilities,
telephones, good trade agreements,
South Viet Nam, etc. if you would
just quit going to Peking and Moscow
for free lunches and trash talking the
US. Should have been a good deal for
both sides.
For Iraq? Just sit down with Saddam
and make him an offer, personally,
one on one, he couldn't refuse.
For the German Tiger tanks, from all
I've understood from the history,
the US managed mostly to avoid the
Tiger tanks in tank to tank battles.
Instead: (A) We avoided those tanks,
e.g., during the Normandy invasion,
due to US air superiority, the Germans
had a tough time even getting Tiger
tanks to Normandy. (B) Otherwise
in Europe, the US killed Tiger tanks
heavily from the air, e.g., from
P-47s. (C) Otherwise, say, in North
Africa, the US used artillery.
In the Battle of the Bulge
maybe the Tiger tanks were low
on fuel.
Maybe the Tiger tanks were in
a "battle of attrition" tank to tank battles
with Russia at Kursk.
Broadly in conventional war, win the air battle,
and the rest is routine and not in doubt.
That's what the US did to both
Germany and Japan and to Saddam in Gulf War I.
And that's what the Battle of Britain
was about: Germany knew that they had
to win the air war before invading
England, Germany was not able to
win the air war against the British --
mostly because the German planes did
not have enough range.
And, in short, winning the air war is
the purpose of the
F-22 now.
The economy is not some game where millions of people needlessly do actions for no purpose. We don't hire people at great expense to purposelessly move mountains between states, or rip each others hair out. The economy allocates resources. The fact that some of the wasted dollars spent on needless militarism splashes back into producing food for some of the people that were taxed in the first place isn't a goal, its a pitiful side effect. The same resources could have been used to further spaceflight, AI, public health, peace, or the environment in or outside of public spending. Warfare is a hellish waste.
A lot of it comes back to the broken education system in the US. The military and prison system absorb some of the least employable and underprivileged young men and women. In the case of the military it gives them a sense of purpose and pride. In the best case they either learn a trade or can go to college afterwards. And as a sibling comment points out, military spending has for the longest time been used for high technology research (Bell labs, MIT etc.).
> The military and prison system absorb some of the least employable and underprivileged young men and women.
Have you ever actually met someone in the military, or does your knowledge come from movies and TV? The vast majority of Americans don't meet the military's standards; our officer and enlisted corps are some of the most employable people in the country. They're smart, capable and dedicated, precisely what one wants in employees.
> The same resources could have been used to further spaceflight, AI, public health, peace, or the environment in or outside of public spending. Warfare is a hellish waste.
It's by no means perfect, but military spending has greatly benefited spaceflight, AI, public health (aid after disasters, advanced prosthetics), etc.
While this is but that only looking at one part of the coin, its very hard to say what outcomes would have happend if these resources were allocated diffrently, either by markets or some other governemnt programm.
The hole idea that 'lets make war and we will probebly get some side benefits out of it' is not substainable, we could have any arbitrary goal and dumb money on the problem and we will get side benefits.
As a minor example we might mention the Internet, which basically grew out of projects funded by DARPA. DARPA by the way was originally started up by Eisenhower, who someone mentioned in another comment.
What who you rather get out of your tax dollars, roads and parks and fast internet, or explosives and ammo? Both mean jobs for Americans all the same. It's the value of the output that's different.
Why funnel efforts and capital into military instead of funneling the same into producing infrastructure, consumer goods, and advancing science? Yes, both are contributing to "the economy". One is creating collective value, the other is enriching military contractors and creating an incentive to wage war.
> People funnel money into the military because they are afraid of terrorists and whatever else is the flavor of the month.
Do you know any individuals who personally decided to funnel money into the military? It's an insatiable beast fed by political breakdown and cronyism.
You don't need many tanks to fight terrorists. Yet the army is forced to buy more tanks (against its own wishes!), because congressmen don't want the tank-production in their state to stop.
That's not how federal spending works. There is no fixed amount so spending money on the military does not preclude spending money on space research. Similarly, cutting military spending doesn't mean those savings would go into any other budget.
Building bombs and guns is the economic equivalent of depression-era ditch digging (worse, in fact, since they can only be used to destroy economic output). Sure, you are paying people's salary to make them but you aren't producing anything that is a benefit to the economy.
No, you're incorrectly assuming that "the economy" is a single unified whole, owned-by and benefiting a harmonious global hivemind.
In reality... the door to your home has a lock on it, right? Think about the materials and effort that went into the design, manufacture, installation, and ongoing operation of that lock. Are those "wasted"? After all, it doesn't actually produce anything new! In fact, its entire purpose is to sit there and impede the flow of resources... which would otherwise flow towards people who think they can utilize them more effectively...
For a more naturalistic example, what about your body's immune system? A big portion of your body's "budget" is invested in mechanisms for finding and destroying other organisms, ones which have done quite a bit of their own work to build themselves up. Do you honestly weigh the Staphylococcus economy equally to your own?
I imagine I would find it somewhat more difficult to justify having the most heavily locked door in the world - which, by reasonable context, is closer to analogy being drawn above.
Someone has to have killed the most children as well, but that's hardly a justification one would care to rely on in court.
My point was not that no-one could justify an extreme of door locks but that I could not. If someone wants to try and justify an extreme of door locks, they're welcome to do so. But merely noting that we all do some thing, or that someone has to have done the most of it, is not such a justification even by analogy.
I disagree with the "context" you're trying to conjure up here. Petersellers' post is quite explicit, and directly equates paying for the construction/use of weapons to paying laborers to dig/re-fill holes in the ground.
At no point did he say it was disproportionate to the nation's wealth (or dirt-supply.)
Rather, his post argues it shouldn't happen at all.
In a part of the discussion talking about the arms industry funnelling tax dollars back into the American economy. I don't find it particularly unlikely that someone might then equate, within that context, it to be effectively analogous to ditch digging and not bother to qualify their remark more fully.
But, we can assume:
1. That Petersellers has grown to adulthood with a remarkably naive understanding of human nature.
2. Believes that the industrial and design capacities of modern nations are such that we could conjure effective weapons faster than a strike could be effectively delivered.
3. That they meant their statement in a somewhat more bound form.
Since 1 & 2 seem either unlikely to be held, or to be held by a mind that hasn't been convinced by the other arguments / observations it would have come across to the contrary, the latter seems the most useful context to interpret their remarks in. The others would either be mistaken assumptions or remove the point of talking to them.
I think you are underestimating the effect that globalization has regarding the linking of economies of nations together. Blowing up your neighbor will result in negative consequences for your own economy, even if they aren't a direct trading partner with you.
Additionally, your analogies don't really fit with the behavior of the US and how it utilizes its vast military resources. We aren't acting defensively, we are instead acting very aggressively and overthrowing governments who we perceive to be our enemy.
Maybe my initial statement wasn't very clear: I'm not for a 100% reduction in military costs, as I think it can provide an insurance benefit when used defensively. But in the context of the discussion, regarding the funneling of trillions of dollars into the machine: that level of spending is incredibly wasteful, unnecessary and even harmful when you consider the negative side effects that have arisen from our brazen use of these resources.
What you don't quite understand is that there are inherent costs of inefficiencies of monopoly from a militaristic system like ours. Sure, all the people "employed" by defense contractors and military are funneling money into the economy, but it's so grotesquely inefficient and wasteful of a process, let along there are those huge losses for inefficiency and unnecessary management and corruption that comes with it, not even to mention that the smart guys who take a job with a defense contractor to pump out some shitty code or manage a shitty project as a result of corruption and congressional micro-management; could have developed a new technology or started a business to contribute something positive to society.
What you seem to be missing is that military expenditures beyond self-defense are mostly inefficiencies. Squandered money and efforts and potential all because our form of warlords are siphoning off trillions of dollars from our economy and collective efficacy. It's really not any different than the same thing warlords to in the places you think of when I say warlord like Somalia or Afghanistan or the DR Congo; just far more sophisticated and devious in their effect.
Why not to give away these dollars to the workers then, but without building weapons? Just make sure that workers are not sitting idle and attend gym during work hours.
End result is the same, whether bombs are in the storage or are not in the storage - all we see is a locked storage door anyway.
This has positive benefits such as companies like FN opening up shop stateside thus providing jobs to Americans. If I remember correctly, FN is now the largest small arms producer in the U.S. even surpassing Colt as far as supplying arms to the military and the civilian market.
Yes, commercial businesses are obviously part of the economy. I was just being more specific, lest the parent comment be construed as referring to general economic stimulus.
Sure, but a very large fraction of that money goes into things that are quite literally just blown to bits. There is an actual destruction of resources.
Conservation of energy insists that it's just a reallocation of resources.
Today's landfills (and bombing targets) are tomorrow's mines. It's only when we get into nuclear materials that those resources become inviable for rediscovery.
No, because it's increasing entropy. In the case of explosives, one could argue the entire point is to produce maximum entropy. Which means they are effectively designed to minimize the value that can be reclaimed after they are used.
"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.
Im absolutly no Keynsian but you are misrepresting it. Keynesiansim is not 'lots of government spending' its about increasing spending in case of AD shortfall.
Now that might be millitary spending but that only works in a limited set of cases.
But the basic idea is of course often used as a excuse by lots of people. Turns out neither the voters nor the politicans have actually read much actual economic theory.
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".
Bingo. Only a wide-eyed statist would ask "why do we fight all these wars we can't win". Uh, we're winning them alright.
The point, as you said, is to destabilize some key regions so that a certain chosen territory can live off an oil monopoly and control pipelines across continents.
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.
More likely the author misunderstood the interpreter, I would think. It sounds to me like he was saying he doesn't understand what the locals are saying when they speak in their native dialect to one another; that doesn't mean he can't understand what they're saying when speaking to him.
Also to add: any Arab will pick up any other local dialect/accent pretty quickly as well. I highly, highly doubt any Egyptian living in Iraq for a period of time would not be able to pick up the dialect rather quickly.
I highly, highly doubt any Egyptian living in Iraq for a period of time would not be able to pick up the dialect rather quickly.
Except when you're working for an occupying military force, you're not really "living" in the country you're occupying. Unless you're native, you're living on a military base -- i.e. with the occupiers, and not with the locals.
Which is one of many, many reasons why these kinds of military operations tend not to work so well.
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.
I actually agree with this sentiment, but learning the local language is the best first step to learning the local culture. It's much, much harder to really understand how people live without first understanding how they talk to each other.
And I think that people really underestimate how hard it is to learn these languages well. It can take years of immersion to be fully fluent to where communicating really really effective. I would think that we would have jobs in our military that would be responsible for learning languages from all kinds of places around the world, should we need to be there.
They (=the us government) actually do, and the foreign service institute has some of the best language programs around [1] (some old courses are now even in the public domain [2]). Unfortunately those are mostly reserved to diplomats and would be hard (impossible?) to scale to occupation-army levels.
But they clearly either don't have enough people in that MOS or have enough but specializing in the wrong languages, if frontline units still need to rely on hired translators.
The Defense Language Institute has massive failure rates for students in the Cat 5 languages. Most of these courses are also at least a year long, if not more. They would probably have to increase the overall size of that facility 20-fold to produce enough linguists annually to have qualified linguists embedded in every unit.
The other big problem is that the people that (traditionally) do best in a linguistics MOS are usually highly intelligent and work well in an intelligence type of career field. Most of these would not do well in a battle-hardened infantry unit.
There has to be enough people in our ranks with enough intelligence to learn these languages. You don't have to be the best linguist, just a capable one that is willing to work hard. Not to mention that every combat troop should probably be getting at least cursory training in the local language as part of their on going training when not out in the field engaged in combat.
Our soldiers are not stupid, and if we treat them like the intelligent and invaluable human beings that they are then I think we might see far more success that we can even imagine. Imagine if you could understand the locals even 20% of the time vs our current nearly 0% for most units. How much more effective would we be in not only our intelligence in the field, but being able to convey our support for them and helping to relate to the local population.
It's not intelligence, but motivation that line units lack, in my experience. People who volunteer for the front line are more interested in solving problems with firepower than more peaceful interactions.
This sort of observation led to a suggestion that the American military should be divided into a Leviathan part and a System Administrator part, an idea I think is worth considering. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pentagon's_New_Map for more.
That might work, if units weren't on 6-12 month rotations. If anything, our "professional" military is probably not professional enough. If we were actually going to attempt to garrison these places and build relations with the natives, you'd need to commit to leaving units in place for years, and allow officers and men to develop the intimate local knowledge and relationships to succeed.
I do agree in part. I don't know if it's a American way of doing things--Clint Eastwood style, or we are just Thick? I have felt for a long time we need to change the way we train our military, and even our local police forces. I know it all goes out the window once someone is killed, but there has to be a happy medium?
I know these orders come from above, along with just how much
you can get away with. What I am trying to say is besides a
little common sense thrown into boot camp and military intelligence(yea, it's ironic, and I feel weird putting the words together-); we need to get rid
of the bad Apples. We all know that guy who shouldn't be holding a gun, or promoted to ridiculously high ranks, but it
just goes on and on?
No--I don't want an army/force of Stewart Smalliey's. I am just tired of people in authority who are just too eager to kill someone, or make someone's life miserable--just because they can? And I have witnessed that plus 95% of the people will push that button towards death--in real life and the Millgram experiment. I have found very few people will stand up for the right thing--if standing up affects their future? (Please--don't respond with we produce results. All I see is we alienated another generation of people who are angry--and not just abroad. It's funny, I am hesitant on
posting this, but because I know poeple are leaching off my IP they would have to take out at least three homes? Paranoid--a little?)
I disagree with the assertion that "isolated" Americans can't learn the culture. During the Phoenix Program in Vietnam, plenty of Americans with no local experience picked it up fast enough when deployed for results that were tactically very effective.
"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!
> An interesting startup idea would be shaking up existing translation services. It would be difficult and non-trivial. Ideal startup field!
I'm not really sure what you mean by this. Many tech-oriented small companies and startups have already come and gone in the translation field. It is indeed difficult and non-trivial.
Here is one. If this is the company I was originally thinking about, they make their money by having their recently educated users translate documents from the learned language into their native dialect.
DuoLingo is great, but very easy to fall out of the process.
I think gaining fluency in another language is a very practical and even romantic notion. There'd be millions of people willing to pay $x00 to gain fluency if it was low effort or smartly accelerated - I'd be one of them.
But the consistent time and effort required for now is evidently too much. Hopefully someone thinks outside of the box and breaks open the game. Maybe AR where you're paired with a native speaker or even an avatar of one.
Or an app that reads you word/phrase reminders throughout the day via headphones, so you are semi-immersed for 12 hours rather than dedicated for 30 minutes.
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.
We have allowed the word "War" to be bastardized in everyday usage with things like "The War on Drugs" or "The War on Poverty" and now the "War on Terror" but "War" is something very specific.
The United States of America is not at "War" unless there is a Declaration of War from the Congress. The Congress of the United States of America has not declared war in over 70 years.
It's not likely to happen unless this country is facing a very real, existential threat. Declaring war is like flipping a switch on our Constitutional and economic systems.
> The United States of America is not at "War" unless there is a Declaration of War from the Congress.
The Constitution gives the Congress the power to declare war, but the extension of that to "war doesn't exist unless Congress declares it" is reading something into the Constitution which is not expressly there, and which there is a fairly good historical argument (which every Supreme Court case to take up the issue, starting fairly early on in the Republic, also sided with) is not at all intended.
> The Congress of the United States of America has not declared war in over 70 years.
This is not true; just as Congress doesn't have to use magic words when it invokes, say, its interstate commerce power, or its taxation power, neither does it when it choses to exercise its power to declare war; acts of Congress like the 2001 "9/11 AUMF" and the 2003 "Iraq AUMF" are both examples of exercises of the power to declare war (in both cases, declarations made conditional on executive acts.)
> Declaring war is like flipping a switch on our Constitutional and economic systems.
Declaring war is not like flipping a switch on the Constitution. Nor the economic system, really, though separate radical acts in the economic arena may be premised on the existence of a state of war.
What do you mean by 'technically'? If you mean by the definition that the Constitution follows, the US is not at war. If it was, Congress would be required to declare it.
Not really. NATO Article 5 was invoked on 12 September 2001. In that way every country in the NATO alliance was de-facto at war as an attack on one is an attack on all. This go-ahead was given on the basis that evidence proving the guilt of Osama bin Laden would be provided later, so that was a 'provisional go-ahead'.
The effect of this NATO 'trick' was that no presidents or prime ministers had to show evidence or get their parliaments to vote for the war. In effect Tony Blair's mate at NATO made the war possible with one meeting and one press conference, claiming that he had seen the evidence proving Osama bin Laden's guilt. Whatever that evidence was is something that the world didn't follow up on with NATO.
Modern trench warfare using massed firearms, entrenched positions, and artillery arguably began in the mid-19th century (the American Civil War and the New Zealand Wars, for example). It wasn't until after the first World War that the major powers started treating it as an intractable problem.
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.
Northern half controlled by ISIS? What? ISIS hold a single city in the North: Mosul. They have operational zones in Baiji, Kirkuk, Tikrit and areas of Anbar. The South isn't decided by Sunnis vs Shiites because the South is overwhelmingly Shiite.
I'd argue that Iraq's democracy, where power is strictly divided and minorities have guaranteed representatives - including a minimum quota system for women in parliament - is more democratic than the two-party "Supreme Leader" system the U.S has going on. But that's a different story.
Very few insurgent groups take and occupy territory in the way that conventional military forces do. When discussing the influence of insurgents, it's more worthwhile to talk about the territory through with they can travel and operate unimpeded. By that metric, IS does "hold" almost half of Iraq, in that they can travel throughout most of Northern Iraq without fearing attack from the Iraqi or Syrian militaries [1].
>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.
All true, but the discussion here is around the effectiveness of the U.S. military and you are referring to the political failure to build a strong enough post-US occupation Iraq.
> Afghanistan is also sectarian. Neither are anything we'd recognize as free and stable democracies.
I don't think the expectation of western-style democracies coming into existence is reasonable in that part of the world. We can all wish for it... But that doesn't mean the U.S. military (pre-whithdrawl) wasn't effective in effecting regime change and maintaining control.
>Our wars there were brutal, protracted, expensive, and ultimately didn't work.
brutal, protracted, expensive- yes, yes, yes
ultimately didn't work- sure, but I would argue that was not a military failure and this discussion is about the military performance.
A better article would have been "The US sucks at post-WWII nation building"...
> brutal, protracted, expensive- yes, yes, yes ultimately didn't work- sure, but I would argue that was not a military failure and this discussion is about the military performance.
The generals are the link. They must translate political objectives into military action that delivers them. The US probably has the best fighting force, but it lacks leadership and focus. The whole Iraq and Afgani adventures look to me like the bridge in Apocalypse Now.
>All true, but the discussion here is around the effectiveness of the US military
Yes, but you're the one who brought in the factor of achieving political goals. The US most certainly did not achieve it's political goals in either Iraq or Afghanistan. Neither country is an especially friendly or reliable ally. If anything, we've set back our political goals in both regions by decades. The fact that it was civilian incompetence rather than military blundering which caused the US to squander those goals irrelevant to the question. The question is, "Did the US achieve its political goals in Iraq and Afghanistan?" The answer to that question is a pretty clear, "No," in both cases. Of course we can argue about why the answer is "No" and whose fault that is, but it's difficult to argue that the US and its allies accomplished any of their goals in either Iraq or Afghanistan.
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."
The French and Indian War wasn't the French fighting against the Indians. It was the Americans and British fighting against the French and the Indians.
Sorry about ruining the joke, but "the French and Indian War" is simply the name Americans gave to their part in the Seven Years War, a worldwide war between France (and allies) and Britain (and allies).
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.
I agree: I was being pedantic, but I don't think inaccurate: there is surely some case: the USA declared war and didn't actually achieve their principal objectives.
Does awarding "victory" depend upon who declares war? Surely there's some case to be made that for Britain, maintaining the status quo was a victory: unlike the USA they hadn't aimed for a change from the status quo.
The US did not attempt to invade and seize Canada and fail at it. The War of 1812 wasn't much more than a short-duration skirmish between Britain and the US, with both still bitter about the Revolutionary War and the various dealings and arrangements that came out of it.
Well, there were attempts, but they were extremely half-assed attempts. Often, the militia that made up the bulk of the U.S. army at that time would refuse to cross outside their state lines, which aborted several planned campaigns to attack into upper and lower Canada.
The whole affair isn't much more than a weird side-show of the Napoleonic wars, although you'd never know that from the way it is presented in most U.S. history textbooks.
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.
they had a secondary goal to find Bin Laden they achieved that goal too.
In a different country, a decade later, by completely different means, after he'd been allowed to escape Afghanistan. Hardly a rousing success. In fact, a total failure, necessitating a number of different subsequent attempts. If you fail repeatedly and then succeed once, you don't get to call the first failure a success.
What then happened was what is commonly known as peacekeeping.
No. What then happened is commonly known as alienating the local population repeatedly, losing all your popular support, becoming the laughable tool of local animosities, and in so many ways just fucking everything right up in an orgy of incompetence, aided so admirably by the British who shared many of the incompetencies, but managed to demonstrate some of that at even greater levels and still, to a large extent, refuse to accept how appallingly badly they did. Face the facts; initial invasion a success, attempt to build a nation total fucking cluster.
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.
Couldn't you say the same for the Vietnam War? After the Tet Offensive, North Vietnam was reeling from it's failure to achieve its military objectives (it was an absolute success politically).
The US got North Vietnam to agree to a peace treaty and then left South Vietnam. Vietnamization failed and once the North Vietnamese realized the US wasn't going to help the South anymore, they just took the whole country.
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 :)
>The British were able to control vast swaths of the world with minimal military power. They fought smart.
The world changed. The British and French couldn't control those colonies anymore. Guerrilla insurgencies are very hard to beat.
In order to win you either have to convince the people to support you, which is almost impossible as an outsider. Or you make them fear you worse than the insurgency. That is impossible under international law.
But if the US really wanted Afghanistan to bend to it's will and didn't care about international law? Just carpet bomb villages that don't support you against the Taliban. Relocate tribes to reservations and resettle your supporters.
Why didn't Japan and Germany have insurgencies? They were afraid of what we'd do.
> The world changed. The British and French couldn't control those colonies anymore. Guerrilla insurgencies are very hard to beat.
In the case of Britain, they spent so much on WW I and had barely recovered by WW II. They were literally a fortnight away from having to surrender during WW II. The US played a masterful hand in helping the UK out, and the one of the post-war prices was US pressure to decolonize so the US could expand its sphere of influence.
The fact the Britain was also reduced, financially, for relying on ex-colonies like New Zealand and Australia to send free food and pay down its war debts[1] meant that they didn't have much choice. Less a straight military loss - the British had plenty of experience putting down rebellions as brutally as needed, after all - and more having dropped from a superpower to a US client state.
France was different, since De Gaulle had preserved a great deal more autonomy for France in the post-WW II era (hence a lot of US hostility). But France was a lot weaker as well, even if it wasn't a US client state. They did, however, hang on to more of their colonies, even in the face of persistent opposition in places like New Caledonia.
[1] For sentimental reasons, not particularly well repaid with the manner of the British entry to the EU.
Part of it was that the US signaled after WWII that it would support Western Europe, but it wouldn't help them colonize the world.
The British and French were shocked (and pissed) when the US sided with Egypt and the Soviets against European colonialism.
The only reason the British didn't suffer a string of horribly embarrassing loses to insurgencies is because the British just gave up after Suez. They would have had their Indochina and Algeria had they tried to keep it all.
The French were winning in Algeria, but the population was unable to stomach what its soldiers were doing, and voted overwhelmingly (>80%) in favour of decolonization, pushing the government to move from an over to covert control over the colonies (from actual colonies, to Francafrique). Many African leaders today are French-trained, French-selected and acting in French interests (although these increasingly seem to be a subset of US interests) and as such are better thought of as "black governors of French territory".
It is relatively easy to control a country. Send it back to the stone age, keep a limited size, but modern and efficient force close by to protect the administrators of what ensues against the occasional attempt. Cf the French Marines who stopped two coups on Omar Bongo's palace, or the 1,000 troops flown in from Chad to defend French interests in the ROC.
The British successfully fought against a communist insurgency in Malaysia from 1948 - 1960. It's one of the more commonly referenced examples on how to combat guerillas and insurgents.
Search for "Malayan Emergency" if you want more information.
Well, the difference is that the US military is unstoppable against a military foe - the US can fight armies, but they absolutely suck at occupation. They won the Iraq war ('mission accomplished') but the occupation was an absolute disaster, somehow thinking that you can pacify a country through the use of military outposts rather than political nous.
All those pithy quotes about getting a soldier to fight by appealing to his soul rather than his wallet (ideas over the physical), these things apply to civilians too - just because you have a military base, doesn't mean they will believe in your ideology. As the article says, if you're not willing to get out amongst the people, you'll never understand them.
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."
To be fair, the pre-ordained script was put together to utilize the resources that were brought in to run the challenge after General van Riper wiped the floor with them. Yet, even with the victory accomplished by General van Riper, the military had to suffer losses in Iraq before it changed the leadership to handle the asymetric nature in 2005.
The issue with militaries is that unless they lose, there is no need for improvements. The Romans troddled along until Hannibal wiped certainty off their face, the Romans retooled, focused around a military society, and learned sailing from captured triremes to beat the better adversary. Prussia lost to France and the professional soldiering class was built up that is still reflected in German society today in their cultural approaches with bureaucracy.
Without the political will to go in a different direction, the entrenched forces within a military will avoid the hard choices needed to changes its system.
>orders were sent via motorcycle courier and signal lamps.
They weren't actually sent that way, they were gamed that way. In the sort of way someone fights a dragon in D&D.
Van Riper (what a name!) essentially glitched the simulation. We've seen how mass organization by carrier and signal lamps works in real battle, not all that well.
The tactic relied on launch massive salvos of cruise missiles at the same time to overwhelm US defenses.
I think it is important that Van Riper showed how that tactic could be used, but it is far harder to pull something like that off.
People make too much of the "rest and make them follow a script." It's not that the Navy doesn't learn from mistakes, but they wanted to test tactics against realistic enemies.
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.
In truth, no one does.
Through history it seems that rights and representation have typically only manifested after long periods of peaceable post-conquest oppression.
Yeah, I think the issue is that we're not willing to do this. Japan and Germany remained peaceful for a number of reasons. First of all, they knew that they had lost, and lost hard: their cities were in ruins; many of their leaders were dead; a large portion of their populations were dead; and huge numbers of foreigners were occupying their nations, making decisions on their behalf with little consultation. Psychologically, they were cowed.
Secondly, there was still an external existential threat: the Soviet Union (or, for the East Germans, the West). We were considered the lesser of evils, so they were more willing to do our bidding.
We won't reproduce these conditions: we're not going to shatter cities and decimate populations (there's also generally no other existential threat). That's morally good, but it makes successful nation-building much more difficult, or impossible.
We should carefully consider if, given that we won't do what it takes to succeed at a task, it makes sense to attempt it anyway.
I wonder if the surge in military suicides has anything to do with their perception of the 'righteousness' of our warfare. It seems like it would be much harder for a soldier to feel good about what they were doing now as opposed to WWII for instance.
"War traditionally was mostly an excuse for plunder. In the modern world, Angell argued, armies slaughtered not prospective slaves but potential customers."
It would appear that many are joining ISIS precisely because they do like obtaining plunder and (sex) slaves.
It's one of the false westerners' believes that keep from fighting ISIS effectively. Just yesterday here was a good article on this topic:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9061725
The answer is at least partly related to the question he asks in the second paragraph: "how can America spend more on its military than all the other great powers combined and still be unable to impose its will on even moderately sized enemies?" What is "will" in a representative democracy? Even when the country is united with a strong plurality for action against some state, it doesn't extend to tolerating much bloodshed or internal discomfort. We may be the first post-modern nation that has simply become unwilling to project its power with the blood of its own citizens. I wonder what that might mean when the drone revolution really arrives?
That brings us to Ukraine, and Russia vs. US (again).
What is the global context to that? Where is the point there?
I know it started with the Eurasian Economic Union vs. the Ukraine–European Union Association Agreement but from what I've heard the EEU is not really worth it and Belarus is not very sure about it anymore. Was that really enough to start the whole show? I mean, Putin can't get out of it now. He's too deep in his own propaganda. While the EU seems to want to get back to calmer times, Obama waits with the fuel tank around the corner reminding the EU and Putin of the fact from time to time. But...what is this supposed to be? A new Cold War show? Really...??
It has more to with U.S. imperialism through it's ally, NATO, than anything else. The larger the reach, the more influence they have to turn economic flows their way.
In a post-nuclear world, there are a lot of puppet wars backed by superpowers. China vs. U.S. (Korea), U.S. vs. Russia (Iran/Israel), etc. Recently Syria has become a U.S. (rebels) vs. Russia (Assad) affair, probably to stop the Iran-Irag-Syria pipeline, which would benefit Russia.
Russia has grabbed Crimea from Ukraine, partly because of the resources there but also because Ukraine is not a member of NATO or EU (even though it was moving in that direction).
Ukraine is caught in the middle of the competition between Russia and the USA. For the US, it isn't about democracy, it is about bringing NATO to Russia's borders. Russia is terrified of NATO (the 2008 war in Georgia was basically the preview of Ukraine).
More than being terrified of NATO (it's not), Russia wants to retain a very high degree of control over its former satellites if it can. Including specifically Belarus, Kazakhstan, Moldova, Georgia, and Ukraine. Russia influences those countries practically as proxies as though they still belong to the old empire. Russia fears losing that control, it doesn't fear the NATO military alliance. I think it's a lot more afraid of trade ties with Western Europe and culturally changes that drive political changes.
The US isn't at Russia's borders — Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and all the rest are. Their freely elected democratic goverments decided that aliging with the US was a good idea.
Well, NATO and the US on themselves are at the border at least with Poland. I guess discussions with the rest would be quick with any kind of "movement" there.
The problem with many of the conspiracy theories presented by other commenters on this thread is that they assume that the government (and by extension the overall military-industrial complex) is much, much more competent than it actually is.
We're not losing wars. We're winning them very quickly.
We're losing the aftermath -- policing and rebuilding foreign countries after we win the wars. That's a much more challenging problem, and we aren't good at that at all.
The will to win isn't politically viable. War is heavily scrutinized and almost entirely unpalatable (to say the least). Sure America may have the might, technology, and numbers, but their enemy lacks political constraint. Now they're faced with ISIL. Their decision makers obviously strive to make visible the least palatable aspects of war in the belief it will expand their sphere of influence.
America should re-think military strategy. Do they wish to 'win' wars with violence? Can they? Or perhaps cyber war, surveillance, and infrastructure--all soft forms of control--are the strategies of the future.
From my European perspective this article is almost stating the obvious, nothing controversial here. The only point is that conditions for victory ("winning the war") need to be clearly defined and they haven't.
I would say he missed the biggest reason: Because we've changed the definition of "winning". It used to be that you just trounced the enemy army and didn't give a damn about what the country looked like afterwards. Go in, kill them till they surrender. This is true of pretty much every war before 1950.
Nowadays we're generally not fighting an established government but instead some form of guerrila force. There is no-one to declare a surrender, therefore the war will never really end.
Fallujah was razed. Phosphorous incendiaries were used as in Dresden. Casualties were much lower though as most of the population had fled by that point.
The answer can be summarized in two words: asymmetric warfare. More accurately called symmetrized warfare, USG's policy of binding itself to different rules of engagement than its enemies, in such a way as to ensure that the two sides are closely matched, is a recipe for unending conflict. The political reasons for this policy are complicated, but the military reasons for the effects of the policy are straightforward.
I wonder what sort of correlation there really is between learning the enemies language and winning a war against them. This big army doesn't win wars because it holds itself back for political reasons. It is not that hard. You have to be 100% focused on total destruction. That is what created the modern Germany and Japan. This half-assed modern style of warfare is good for the arms industry I guess. For them a long war is better than a won war.
I wouldn't really say that the second Iraq War was "lost", per se; it did meet its objective of eliminating the regime of a dictator, after all. It's the swarm of smaller-scale conflicts following it that the United States struggled with.
I agree with all the points presented, though. Very well put.
I completely disagree that any of these conflicts other than Vietnam, were lost. They were just inappropriate use of the military power, akin to the Soviet invasion to Afghanistan. Americans never had a big problem of defeating any enemy, problem was what to do next (and Iraq-91 was a victory for exactly that reason: they quickly withdrew and left defeated Saddam to deal with the mess, with Schwartskopf correctly stating that there is no interest for U.S. to 'run the country'). If you see 'victory' as 'Iraq (or Afghanistan) adopting a stable US-style democracy', which apparently was an intent, than this 'war' is not winnable, and there is nothing to blame military for in this fact.
In fact, Soviets had similar problems. They could win wars when they really wanted to, but they similarly set unrealistic, or outright lunatic political objectives which predictably failed. Communism works in Afghanistan no better than democracy.
The Vietnam War being lost is similar to proclaiming that Iraq was lost after the invasion (the occupation time frame). There was no victory basis in either case. Vietnam was a holding pattern, as the US chose not to march north with its full might.
Not to mention, the Vietnam War was a civil war. Would we declare that France lost the Revolutionary War, had the colonies been defeated by Britain? I'm skeptical.
Had the US abandoned South Korea like it did South Vietnam, people would proclaim the Korean War a failure as well. The primary difference between the two, is the US chose to protect South Korea perpetually. Had the US stayed and protected South Vietnam, I think it's very unlikely that war would be regarded as essentially a total failure. It's not very complicated, the US chose to leave because it was exhausted culturally, not because it was defeated militarily.
They overthrew Milosevic, Taliban, Hussein, Austin, Noriega, Bosch, Gaddafi, ... Fighting guerrilla wars is the problem. Firepower obviously doesn't help in guerrilla wars.
In individual battles, the U.S. almost never loses. The raw military capability the U.S. possesses is staggering. It's so vast that in actual wars, the Army doesn't even do the bulk of actual fighting anymore, and massive garrison forces in Europe and Asia barely see a dip in total manpower. Special Forces and Marines go in to clear the way for big Army to come in and sit and patrol like an overamped police force.
The opening invasion of the first Gulf War was over in what, 5 weeks? This was a military power that Iran fought to a virtual standstill for almost a decade. People forget about this part, because the rest of the occupation was such a debacle. But when the U.S. military gets pointed at an objective, it will generally get the job done. The military on military loss exchange ratios are astonishing, like 150:1. In most of history, 4:1 or 5:1 is considered overwhelming. In the Korean war, it was about 4:1 for example. Vietnam was about 1:1
The problem is that the world has changed and the U.S. has changed. Achieving occupation no longer counts as "winning" and the U.S. no longer has the will to simply carpet bomb and shell an enemy to the point of complete annihilation.
The U.S. fights wars for precision and to minimize non-combat casualties.
Genghis Khan would simply raze a city to the ground and murder every man woman and child if he faced resistance. The U.S. orders Marines to go in for a door-to-door clearing operation and try real hard not to shoot too many innocents. And if that didn't work they'd just go and do it again.[1][2]
War is supposed to be terrible, and there are no "winners". Victory has always been the last to give up or run out of people to throw at the enemy's swords. By sanitizing the terribleness out of war, the U.S. has managed to ensure that it never "wins" anything in particular. It's turned war into large-scale police actions, which means it's regularized it. The U.S. hasn't fought a real war in ages. Everything else has been policing.
The U.S. doesn't really have many big enemies, it has rabble rousers and riff-raff on the edge of it's sphere of influence it needs to deal with -- rogue and failed states, non-state actors, whatever. Most of the world is America's town and it sends in police/soldiers to deal with the bad parts of town and "keep the peace"
In a normal town, nobody cares if the police "win", just so long as things are relatively safe for the good parts of town. Police are part of the infrastructure of successful nations. The U.S. military strives to be the global police infrastructure of a successful world.
The commander-in-chief has just been turned into chief-of-police of the biggest baddest police force in the world.
> implying the goal of fighting the war is to "win" it.
The purpose of fighting the war is to motivate the mining and weapons development industries. If a constituency receives $50 million dollars to produce a type of ammunition or equipment and research the next generation, its large business owners, skilled workers and labor have "won," at least in the short term.
>The primary aim of modern warfare is to use up the products of the machine without raising the general standard of living...
>The problem was how to keep the wheels of industry turning without increasing the real wealth of the world. Goods must be produced, but they must not be distributed. And in practice the only way of achieving this was by continuous warfare. The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labour. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent.
For some reason China's "ghost cities" come to mind: enormous efforts expending tremendous resources, only to leave entire urban regions to decay unused.
That happens everywhere to some degree. In corrupt countries it's very common that politicians announce the building of big schools and hospitals, but the projects are never finished. The construction companies bribe the politicians to get the contracts, and then it doesn't even matter whether they ever complete the job, no one will control that.
I often criticize US army, but this article is just b * t. And not single word about what is actually wrong with US army (F35 and similar projects)
> More than three-quarters of Americans in Iraq didn’t fight. A ridiculously large number
75% of servants in army (support roles) is pretty stable number since Roman Legions times.
> the American military is too big and bulky. Special Forces are lean and mean and
Fighting street by street, block by block takes large number of men.
> 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.
> If more American soldiers understood Arabic, their insight and awareness of Iraqi culture could have made a huge difference.
Army should not do police work. There should be para-military units (gendarme) composed from locals, but from different regions. US did great job at Philippines with this strategy.
> Fear of Casualties
> It is impossible to imagine William the Conqueror, Genghis Khan, Napoleon, or Patton focusing above all else on not losing soldiers.... . Historically, officers are happy to use their men as cannon fodder if it will help them achieve their objectives.
I will take any US 'war hawk' over this guy anytime. BTW Russians captured Crimea with 2 casualties, so much about 'not enough deaths'.
> Only go to war if it is worth sacrificing your children. When Hitler invaded Russia, Stalin’s son went to the front, was captured and eventually died in a POW camp
Paragraph about Yakov Dzhugashvili is nice, perhaps just add what happened to his family after he was captured. Also UK prince served in Iraq as far as I know
> Fifty thousand Americans died in Vietnam. So did more than 2 million Vietnamese. If war were a numbers game, America would have been victorious. But war is ultimately a matter of will. The North Vietnamese were willing to suffer more than the Americans were, because victory was more important to them.
And how many of those Vietnamese were killed by other Vietnamese, French, Koreans...? Americans lost because they could not go near Chinese border. Please read some facts about that conflicts.
> War, What is it good For? Absolutely Nothing. ... When William conquered Britain, when Cortez conquered Mexico, their soldiers made fortunes. War traditionally was mostly an excuse for plunder.
So nobody, not a single person, made any sort of profit on any war in last two decades?
> And not single word about what is actually wrong with US army (F35 and similar projects)
This is a silly mindset. Your preconceived notion about the worst problem shouldn't stop someone else from talking about a different one. If you looked you will notice that other than quoting complaints at the beginning, the vast majority of the article ignores costs. They speak only of effects.
It is easier to question military spending by first pointing out why throwing money at problems isn't working, since you can't easily quantify the benefit of the military you can't just apply cost benefit analysis and have a convincing argument.
> 75% of servants in army (support roles) is pretty stable number since Roman Legions times.
And that number works great in Roman style conflicts. When you have a force power huge logistic lines make a great target, refocusing your logistics is a way to minimize that weakness.
> Fighting street by street, block by block takes large number of men.
You assume that is the ideal method of fighting the conflict.
> Army should not do police work. There should be para-military units (gendarme) composed from locals, but from different regions. US did great job at Philippines with this strategy.
You didn't actually disagree with him here but frame it as if you did. He said they sucked at understanding local needs but acted on what information they had. You said that they shouldn't act on local things.
> I will take any US 'war hawk' over this guy anytime. BTW Russians captured Crimea with 2 casualties, so much about 'not enough deaths'.
Was the goal of Crimea to minimize casualties? Because it isn't the results he is criticizing but the mind set. "#1 don't let anyone die. #2 win" isn't the best strategy if you want to win.
> Americans lost because they could not go near Chinese border. Please read some facts about that conflicts.
You aren't actually disputing his point, but simply pointing to a different one. There are lots of things that cause Vietnam to go bad, their ability to sustain casualties certainly helped.
You make some solid points, but let me take issue with a few:
Army should not do police work. There should be para-military units (gendarme) composed from locals, but from different regions. US did great job at Philippines with this strategy.
Not sure I would hold up the Philippine War as a paragon of US military involvement; Otis' war strategy essentially consisted of concentration camps, wholesale slaughter (e.g., the Moro Crater Massacre), the deliberate blockading and starvation of urban populations, and commonplace torture and summary execution of enemy soldiers and innocent civilians alike, all waged in the name of "liberty," "democracy" and freedom from a warlike religion -- though the religion in that case was Catholicism, not Islam. Fluency in Tagalog wasn't necessary when your primary method of communication was the sharp end of a bayonet. An average day in the Philippines made My Lai look like a Amnesty International convention.
75% of servants in army (support roles) is pretty stable number since Roman Legions times.
Actually, the "tooth-to-tail" ratio has steadily increased in favor of logistical support; US combat brigades in World War One consisted of about 78% fighting soldiers, versus about 43% of a current combined arms brigade (for theatre-level forces, the numbers were 53% to 25%, respectively. The fighting strength of theatre-level forces in Iraq is actually below the Jackson-Nunn threshold mandated for Western European forces.) But, as you point out, this isn't the entire story; what the author fails to understand is that it takes a lot of logistical footprint to support every one of those special forces teams. Furthermore, once you start adding in Abrams armor, SBCTs, Navy ships, Marine and Air Force aviation, and all the rest of the panoply of modern war, plus the need to provide "blankets, beans and bullets," it's remarkable the military has a 1:3 warfighter ratio. (To put it another way, the author would be well-advised to recall the old military maxim, "Amateurs talk about strategy; professionals worry about logistics.")
BTW Russians captured Crimea with 2 casualties, so much about 'not enough deaths'.
But hundreds of Russian soldiers have died in Eastern Ukraine since then, though the Kremlin has been burying (so to speak) the actual extent of casualties (cynically, Putin doesn't mind getting his soldiers killed, it's the gravedigging he hates). The US isn't the most protective of its soldiers -- that honor probably goes to Israel, the "Hannibal Protocol" notwithstanding -- but for a country engaged in a decade and a half of open warfare, it's remarkably loathe to endanger its warfighters.
I appreciate that the author was in the Theater of Operations. I respect that he has an enormous amount of anecdotal data about military personnel and conflict. That being said, this person appears to have a rather shallow understanding of the nature of conflicts as it pertains to Geo-politics.
To say the US has not won a war since Korea is idiotic, as the US did NOT win; there is a de facto state of war between the Koreas and the US is bound to the South by alliance. I get the feeling that the author is European (just a guess). I wonder what the answers would be if you asked a large range of people (age and nation of association) who won WWII. Asking an American who won the Cold War will probably yield a more homogeneous pool of responses. Ask a N.Korean who won the Korean Conflict and the diversity of answers would drop even further. The point is that anyone can say anything that they want; the winners are decided over and over again culturally as well as historically. There has not been a 'real' war since the Second Global Conflict in terms of losses in material and personnel. If the Ukraine Conflict becomes a shooting war between Russia and Ukraine, the losses in one week could total the entire losses of the US in the ten years of brush beating. 5K soldiers is a paltry sum: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_by_death_toll .
The world has not known war in many years, and it is precisely because of the political efforts of the US, Russia, England & Friends, and more recently China. They do this not out of compassion for their citizens, but out of necessity for their profits.
In forums like these, people love to belabor the trope that war brings technological advances and benefits the D-Con companies solely. They use this as some sort of reasoning behind why the US invades the countries it does. This is silly. War turns an economy to shit. It does this to both sides, though obviously it takes longer for the 'victor' to feel it. Peace == Prosperity. Regardless of the 'billions' that are said to be invested in America's wars, they are trickles compared to the naked power of a well cared for middle class. There is so much more money to be made when people are free to save it and spend it. this is the fundamental principle behind US Capitalism: 1)make peace through force 2)inundate with currency 3)?????? 4) Middle class appears.
Instead of large wars heralding dramatic shifts in power and means, a background of smaller conflicts in emerging raw material provider countries keeps the weapons sales up and makes the way for more ethnically homogeneous locals when the drilling crews show up.
One can say the US loses, and on many counts we do. But the world* wins. We invaded Iraq to stabilize oil supplies, guarantee supremacy, and foment regime change: the European and Chinese oil supply, the supremacy of Saudi Arabia over Iran, and regime change in the Middle Eastern monarchies.
Somewhat non sequitur, but if you want to learn about an amazing american geo-political victory that used some of that 'excessive' spending, try to find info about the shadow campaign waged across the -stans to secure power and water as a preemptive strike against nascent extremist populations. Good luck; there is not much documentation ou there.
Having a clear definition of terms is important, both in conflict as well as in blogposts.
why down vote? US is in love with warfare, for past many decades, people make money off these events and as such make a lot of money. It sucks that this is so, but it is so...
"I don't think that Vietnam was a mistake; I think it was a success. [...]
To determine whether it was a failure you have to first look at what the goals were. In the case of Indo-china, the US is a very free country; we have an incomparably rich documentary record of internal planning, much richer than any other country that I know of. So we can discover what the goals were. In fact it is clear by around 1970, certainly by the time the Pentagon Papers came out, the primary concern was the one that shows up in virtually all intervention: Guatemala, Indonesia, Nicaragua, Cuba, Chile, just about everywhere you look at. The concern is independent nationalism which is unacceptable in itself because it extricates some part of the world that the US wants to dominate. And it has an extra danger if it is likely to be successful in terms that are likely to be meaningful to others who are suffering from the same conditions. " -- Noam Chomsky
"Genghis Khan, Napoleon, or Patton focusing above all else on not losing soldiers. Historically, officers are happy to use their men as cannon fodder if it will help them achieve their objectives"
It is interesting that those three people were famous for being the first one in the battle fighting and risking their lives. I bet it will be different with generals today.
"If their primary interest was oil, American diplomats would have told Saddam to grant exclusive contracts to select oil companies and he would have gladly complied in order to avoid invasion."
Not really. American diplomats told Saddam to grant exclusive contract to US companies. What happened is that Saddam refused, he even started selling the oil in Euros in order to get European support, but did not.
When USA invades a country and spends a trillion dollars on it, it is not Americans the ones who have to pay for it, thanks to the magic of the petrodollar, but the rest of the world.
But Americans companies are those that benefit from the reconstruction effort. American oil companies are the ones who extract the oil. And the petrodollar system remains one year more, because if someone dares to go against the petrodollar(like Iran) sanctions are raised or their country is invaded.
> American oil companies are the ones who extract the oil.
No, they aren't. US companies comprise a fraction of the oil companies extracting oil in Iraq.[1] Moreover, for the American companies operating in Iraq, Iraqi oil supplies < 2% of their worldwide production.
"how can America spend more on its military than all the other great powers combined and still be unable to impose its will on even moderately sized enemies?"
Aside from the the reasons he cited, you can put up there fighting with both hands ties behind our backs.
The politicians want the military to win the hearts and minds, have surgical strikes to reduce civilian casualties, and spend more time keeping up diplomatic relations then killing our adversaries. The media have never been pro-war, never been able to stomach seeing and reporting the brutality of what war really entails.
Patton once said, "Attack rapidly, ruthlessly, viciously, without rest, however tired and hungry you may be, the enemy will be more tired, more hungry. Keep punching."
We haven't done this since Vietnam. You want to win the wars in the middle east? You throw away the Geneva Conventions, you take off the handcuffs and employ the full force of the military. Like Patton said, you attack rapidly, ruthlessly and viciously. If the US even used a fraction of its full firepower, and instead hunted down and killed the terrorists and then made examples of them, their enemies would shrivel up and put down their weapons.
You wanna know why the Mexican drug cartels are feared? You wanna know why people are scared of ISIS and terrorism here in the states and what they've done in Europe already? Because they don't have rules, they instill fear with violence, something the US Military has been unable to do - because of politicians and the media.
Take off the handcuffs and let the full force of the military come down on these people and you'll see them broken, tired and without refuge.
When fighting monsters, one must take care not to become a monster.
Anyways, to answer you more fully:
The media has, depending on what sells, never shyed away from hawkishness. Consider the coverage from, say, Fox in the last decade--only reconsidering the war effort when it let them score political points against someone they disliked.
There is no compelling reason to "throw away the Geneva Conventions". You're a savage.
Also, since when is a people "tired, broken, and without refuge" anything you want to have around? The vast majority of the people conducting these acts of terror across the world are young men hailing from exactly that background--if they were members of proud, stable cultures, they wouldn't be engaging in such behavior.
A satisfying as that view may be, "winning" in that fashion isn't that effective when confronting a non-nation state force. When you engage in all out war, you don't win hearts and minds. When you don't win hearts and minds you must commit yourself to occupying the country forever.
Slapping your wife may "win" you the argument but you don't actually achieve long term goals that way.
When confronted with a gorilla enemy, your potential allies look the same as your enemy. The "just kill em all and let god sort them out" approach is even worse than the current method which aims to reduce killing potential allies. Blowing up a wedding party may kill a terrorist - but also radicalizes the survivors. Chopping one head off the hydra doesn't work.
At the end of the day, one has to accept that some wars are not worth the cost of winning - and if they aren't we shouldn't get involved in the first place. The cost of war is considered "acceptable" by people who aren't actually sending their own sons to die.
For the record, the US didn't win in Vietnam either. Despite not pulling any punches.
But yes, if the US gave a 100%, it may have a chance of actually winning those wars. Considering the collateral damage from decades of "surgical" strikes and drone attacks, I'm not even sure an all-out war would be any worse for the civilians on the receiving end.
It would absolutely ruin any pretence of moral superiority and "clean" warfare, however. And that would make it even more difficult to explain to allies why the US is better than Russia, China or Saudi Arabia.
>> But yes, if the US gave a 100%, it may have a chance of actually winning those wars.
This has been the problem. We don't engage in warfare anymore to win wars, we engage in "interventions" (VietNam) or on the pretense of "protecting regional interests" (Afghanistan, Libya) or by way of "Humanitarian" reasons (Somalia, Russia). For all of the conflicts since VietNam few, if any have had clear, reachable goals. If you were to ask anybody what the goal of the current Afghan war is, I'm not sure many people would know.
The problem is that the logical end of this "unlimited firepower" line of thinking is killing everybody and salting the earth (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salting_the_earth). And while that may look like victory to some, to many others it will look like cruelty -- or genocide.
It's as Tacitus wrote of the Romans: "To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace."
The U.S certainly did pull punches almost the entire war. The Line Backer II operation, which removed those restrictions, force the NV to the table and they were ready to sue for surrender terms...but amazingly the U..S would not let them. In any case everyone agreed to peace and the U.S. went home. After we left the NV broke the peace and invaded South Vietnam again.
Answer is less clear. US was hesitant to go above the 38th parallel line once N Korean army was routed. They were happy to stop there and go back to having 38th parallel line before the Korean War started. However the S Korean troops just marched across 38th parallel in order to reunite the peninsula under 1 government. And the US troops in away just kept going with them. Because the Korean war was so unexpected, no thoughts had been given on what to do.
The Korean peninsula had been 1 kingdom for over 500 years, far longer than Germany as a nation.
Both N Korea and S Korean leaders had been calling for a united Korea, even with force, even before the Korean War. For this reason, US govt hesitated giving heavy weapons to S Korea before the start of the Korean War.
So no, US didn't exactly invade N Korea. N Korea invaded S Korea first.
WWII was a time when the potential fate of the entire world was at stake. You had no choice but to be as ruthless as possible. It was a completely different situation.
In Vietnam and Iraq, that simply wasn't the case. Neither of those countries were worth going "all-in", and it's a good thing we didn't.
Your proposal is not a good one. The increase in civilian casualties will only empower the rebel forces in the long term if we had a "Total War" situation. Not to mention it's completely unethical.
> The media have never been pro-war, never been able to stomach seeing and reporting the brutality of what war really entails.
The most popular cable news channel, Fox, and the most popular newspaper (or at least one of the leaders), the Wall Street Journal, are both hawks. Many local papers are owned by hawks as well as many popular blogs.
My problem with this article is that the author doesn't define the criteria for "winning". What does winning look like in Iraq or Afghanistan?
I generally don't understand what the point of this article is. The US should learn the language of the countries where its soldiers are operating? I can't think of very many armies that have ever done that. Historically it would be the very rare case. And we should we willing to tolerate more bloodshed? The argument seems to be that if we aren't willing to needlessly sacrifice the lives of our soldiers as cannon fodder, then the conflict isn't worth being involved in. I don't think that makes a lot of sense, either.
There are some very flawed premises here. I think the bottom line is that the US military is still the envy of the world. Recent conflicts have been poorly planned in terms of goals and exit strategies, but it's a bit disingenuous to imply that the armed services aren't able to meet military objectives or face threats of all kinds at any point on the globe. There have to be better ways for the author to say "I don't like recent US military actions".
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.