http://www.newsweek.com/id/221623 And it's bed time, so no breakdown of either article, I just wanted to put this up before I forgot. Read them both today at the Library (Army finally caught on, so you can't just click through the mandatory Accident Avoidance Safety Course, instead it is a timed, self clicking 1 hour slide show) and thought it interesting enough to post.
The real lesson of the Vietnam War as it pertains to the U.S. is this: The U.S. military (especially the Army and Air Force) 1) Does not prepare for the next war. 2) Does not prepare for the last war (as the saying often goes). 3) The Army and Air Force of the U.S. prepare for the war they WANT to fight. The U.S. Army (in general as an institution) loathes the idea of fighting guerrilla types of conflicts in some god forsaken third world hell hole for years on end. They want to fight short, decisive massive firepower wars that began and end in months (or weeks preferably). That is what they spent an incredible amount of money preparing to face on the Central Front in Germany. That was Desert Storm. That was the Iraq Invasion. So when a president calls on the Army to undertake 1) Occupation 2) Anti insurgency 3) nation building The Army can honestly claim to not be proficient in such missions because they deliberately don't prepare for them. They don't want to have to fight them, so they don't prepare for them. Same in regards to the Air Force. They want to prepare to battle hordes of MIGs at 20,000 feet. They hate spending money on close air support or air transport. The U.S. Navy has been considerably more flexible since Vietnam since their combat in Vietnam was largely in littoral waters doing the same kinds of support missions they do now. But don't get me wrong. If the U.S. Navy could find another nation with a few carrier battle groups to battle, then that would quickly become the focus of the USN.
You'd better give me a fucking good reason to waste more than 45 seconds on "Newsweek's" thoughts on Vietnam. I've probably studied more on Vietnam than their entire editorial staff. I haven't taken "Newsweek" seriously for about 10 years anyway.
I was thinking about this earlier, and I find it funny that nobody's really hit the nail on the head: Afghanistan is to South Vietnam as Pakistan is to North Vietnam. Washington is afraid to go into Pakistan just as it was afraid to cross into North Vietnam, except this time, they're afraid of nuclear proliferation and political fallout instead of Soviet/Chinese intervention. This war can never end with the status quo; Islamabad has a vested interested in keeping the Taliban propped up. They know that all this foreign aid has only increased as the war has continued, and that it'll dry up when it's over. Nevermind the fact that ISI is both sympathetic to the Taliban, but would like to continue this gamesmanship to get even more foreign aid for their own purposes. Pakistan is the key. Everything else is ancilary.
actually, I think the biggest problem is that the average American doesn't want a real war. We obviously want no one to die (not that this is bad, mind), we don't want anything bad to happen to civillians, etc. No real war is going to be like this. When you add in the 24-hour news cycle, the generals are forced to basicly not fight. The support for the war will wane if people hear about causualties or that the enemy is killed. So we can't use our power to the fullest, thus making it impossible to win. We'll probably never really win another war until the wimpy American culture gorws some balls. We've been totally wimpified, and told that if we fight hard to win the war, we're the bad guys. Which sucks for Afghanistan because they need us to get rid of the Taliban for good, not just keep them out of the capital.
I call it "The A Team Effect". Remember the TV show "The A Team"? Not only did the A Team members never get killed or hurt much.....they never killed anyone (aside from the occasional bloody nose, I don't think they hurt anyone). And personally, I think in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, the Air Force became front and center in promoting the idea of waging war without causing much in the way of death and destruction. I think that the boys in blue worried that their service would be looked down on with the images from Vietnam of villagers running in terror after being napalmed and bombed. Basically, Air Force combat isn't "noble knights of the air fighting it out". It is mainly dropping munitions on ground targets that have little hope of effectively fighting back. It seems brutal and merciless (of course it is). So they promoted the concept of "surgical strikes" with "precision guided munitions" and "no collateral damage" The idea being that "only the really bad guys will get hurt". People need to get a clue. You don't do surgery with bombs.
Vietnam Syndrome is a good thing. It prevents people like Dayton from seeing their carpet-bombing fantasies being fulfilled.
I wonder if this statement ranks with Daytons worst. Previously he has found acceptable the use of human shields and the bombing of civilians airliners, so probably not.
The thing that indiscriminately kills the most people are wars that go on any longer than necessary. Wars are bloody, horrible, and brutal. The only good is in their ending. Virtually any tactic that brings about a quick and decisive end to a conflict is desirable.
Post a link. The "human shields" thing IIRC was in regards to Israel and I don't remember finding it acceptable. IIRC, I denied it was the policy of the Israelies. I never advocated bombing of civilian airliners. I did defend a Cuban who had done something like that in opposition to Fidel Castro because of the evils of communism in Cuba (which exceed by a wide margin any airliner that was destroyed).
Wriggle wriggle. I'll find links for you later. You said that both were acceptable in the circumstances. The reality here is that you wish to pursue an aggressive, violent foreign policy without any regard for how many people get hurt. Everything else is just a front.
Look. You don't like Kerry's views on Vietnam. Kerry DOESN'T LIKE the article. Therefore the odds are that you WILL LIKE the article. Jesus...
And between ramping up drone strikes and the Pakistani military actually fighting the Taleban, the Pakistan situation is improving. In fact the biggest problem right now is that we REALLY need movement on Kashmir. Pakistan woke up when the Taleban took the Swat Valley, and threw a big chunk of their military at them, but they still have a large portion of their Army on the Indian border. The US is doing alot of negotiations behind the scenes with the Indians to get them to try and cool the situation down so that Pakistan will be able to commit it's entire military to the fight.
Not necessarily. If Chris and Henryhill got into a retard fight, that wouldn't mean I'd like either of their opinions.
Read the fucking thing, or take your Liberal Media shtick to another thread and let the adults who read it actually speak. You sound like a retard, especially to those who actually read the article, since the whole point was that we could have won Vietnam, and with decisive action we could win in Afghanistan.
It's a bad thing actually. If the gloves really came off when we were fighting the Taliban or Al-qaida, the war would have been over YEARS ago. But instead of allowing our men to fight, we put all of these insane rules on them -- as though al-qaida was going to live up to the "rules" of war. How many hundreds of people get blown up every year in Afghanistan and Iraq because we haven't yet found the will to WIN? A decisive win would shorten the war, while dithering and hand wringing allows the war to drag on, killing more and more civillians.
Kashmir is INSANE! It's all high-elevation freezing land. Soldiers die of exposure + hypothermia left and right. It's wild!
