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Lots of this seems plausible at a glance, but overall it is highly theoretical. USA hasn't "won" a war since 1945. That result was mostly determined by USSR. Th

Lots of this seems plausible at a glance, but overall it is highly theoretical. USA hasn't "won" a war since 1945. That result was mostly determined by USSR. The USA portion of the result was determined by a quickly-assembled force of farmboys and factory workers led by the same rather than by a professional standing army led by the Pentagon. The Pentagon is incapable of developing weapons and tactics that win wars, because for its entire existence it has been judged by a different metric. We should expect conflicts over which the Pentagon has some influence to be extended and made more resource-intensive than even the marketing can justify. The Pentagon always does that, because that's how armaments manufacturers make more money. We should avoid wars in general, but we should especially avoid a world war with China, Russia, India, and the rest of their many allies. We got beaten by the Taliban, but if we fight 3 billion people we'll get curb-stomped.

hash872 4y ago
Didn't the US win the First Gulf War? What else would you call that?
- jessaustin 4y ago
  If you win the war you get to go home. USA presence in the Arabian peninsula was cited by ObL as the reason for 9/11. Kuwait does export useful hydrocarbons, but much less than the Kingdom which could have increased production to make up for a temporary pause of Kuwait exports. The pause would have been temporary because Iraq would have restarted the export of Kuwaiti hydrocarbons as soon as possible. If anything, fighting a war disrupted the market more than not fighting it would have. A war that was fought for no reason, that didn't end before causing the most disastrous attack on USA soil since 1814, I would call "dumb".
  - 123pie123 4y ago
    >If you win the war you get to go home so America lost WWII then by that logic, because they never went home?
  - toss1 4y ago
    >>A war that was fought for no reason Serious ignorance, right there. The entire reason the war was fought was to enforce the principle that taking other sovereign territory by force is not acceptable. It is the same reason that we support Ukraine's fight for self-determination. You can always make excuses to allow bullies to win. As you pointed out, we didn't rescue Kuwait for their oil, which Iraq would have soon put back on the market. We — the entire alliance of free-world nations — did it, and are helping Ukraine, to support self-determination. Once the principle is established of allowing bullies and autocrats to take what they want, it will never end until they have everything.
    - jessaustin 4y ago
      The entire reason the war was fought was to enforce the principle that taking other sovereign territory by force is not acceptable. A better way for USA to support that principle would have been not to invade the sovereign nations of Cuba, Philippines, Hawai'i, Haiti, Dominican Republic, Panama, North Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Grenada, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Serbia, etc. Those are just a selection of the invasions our leaders admit. There have been far more unacknowledged actions in various parts of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, as well as violent actions that didn't include uniformed USA troops like when we paid Saddam Hussein to have a horrible war with Iran. Also there have been violent actions for which some local support could have been argued, such as when Suharto and his CIA handlers killed millions of people in Indonesia. Also we genocided American Indians for centuries. As soon as there weren't any more of them to kill, the exact same USA army officers were doing the exact same racist violence in Philippines. USA's existence is one continuous rejection of sovereignty. Crackpot realists ITT will gleefully point to my list of USA military victims and crow about "victories" in "war". Many of these were "police actions" in which there wasn't even an opposing force, just civilian victims. That's not war. Also, although every one of these actions served the someone's interests, not one accomplished a military objective that benefited the average American. That's not winning.
      - toss1 4y ago
        And, in how many of those places in which actions took place in the modern era (I totally agree with harshest of assessments of the treatment of the Native Americans) did the US, or any other democratic country, ANNEX the place and take it for their own territory? ZERO. Yes, autocratic rulers were deposed, and in some cases, 'democratically elected' rulers who were openly working with autocrats (USSR, CCP). Was any of it done perfectly? No. But fighting authoritarianism, and in some cases using our authoritarian to fight a worse one was done. I don't necessarily agree with it or disagree, in any particular circumstance, and we'd have to review each one case-by-case. But none of the incidents you cite as "whataboutism" changes the facts of the one being discussed. You even correctly pointed out that it was not for the oil. It was to uphold that principle. The same goes for Ukraine. And many of the others. Geopolitics is an ugly game. But without pushing back, hard, on authoritarians, and building a world order based on forbidding violent taking of territory as Russia is doing in Ukraine (completely consistent with its history since the 1400s). There was a lot done badly, but that is no reason to not attempt to do it better. And leaving it to the Putins, Xis, and Uns of the world will damn sure make it worse in a hurry.
- pwinnski 4y ago
  At the risk of becoming a guy who recommends a ten-hour podcast in answer to single questions, here's a ten-hour podcast to answer your single question: https://blowback.show/Season-1 https://blowback.show/Season-1 I would call it many things, but "a war we won" is not one of them, not at all.
  - mercutio2 4y ago
    Isn’t that about the second gulf war? His explicitly stated point was about the first.
    - pwinnski 4y ago
      That is the subject of the first couple of episodes.
SlickNixon 4y ago
The Pentagon was completed in 1943. There may be some relation between your "farmboys and factory works" and the organization that occupies it now.
seanw444 4y ago
First off, India is not friends with China. They're generally aligned with the west. And also, a world war doesn't mean USA vs everyone else. It means USA+UN+NATO vs. Russia, China, and their respective vassal states. Worst case (and most likely) scenario is everyone loses. But we wouldn't be exclusively curb-stomped.
- jessaustin 4y ago
  India happily talks to and does business with everyone. (In Pakistan's case one might not say "happily"?) Over the last year, it has not taken part in the economic sanctions that USA and its vassals have attempted to impose. Both India and Russia have profited from this decision. We can expect India and similar nations throughout Asia, Africa, and Latin America to continue to pursue their own interests. Therefore, they will form part of our opponents' industrial base. They won't attack our forces until we attack theirs, but they won't be any more "aligned" with us than they are right now. Since much of our own industrial base is in China, our military will prosper while the rest of us will lack most human comforts. Some portion of our military will be diverted from the battlefield to curtail the resulting unrest. We will lose, much more painfully than we lost in Korea or Syria or any of the intervening wars. Alaska, Hawaii, and all Pacific territories will be gone. We'll lose most of our foreign bases. The dollar will be worthless. American-owned intellectual property will disappear. Australia will be (re-)colonized. Germany will re-militarize, and Europe will remember why that's bad. (One might expect that also of Japan, but they are probably too geriatric now.) The portion of Ukraine that Russia doesn't take will be taken by Poland. Israel will abandon us in favor of the Saudi/UAE axis, but that group will decide to coexist with regional rivals rather than follow us down the drain. USA itself might split into several pieces, none of which would be capable of the sort of excessive militarism we've inflicted on the world for the last 120 years. So, not totally bad.
TheGigaChad 4y ago
[dead]
AlotOfReading 4y ago
You should brush up a bit on your military history. The standard combat-readiness training time was 8+ months during WW2 (see [0]), which puts it quite a distance from a "quickly-assembled force of farmboys and factory workers". Similarly, the USSR's victory and WW2 as a whole is much more accurately called an allied victory. The US played a significant role in supporting soviet industrial capacity with programs like Lend-Lease that allowed them to actually fight the war. Other nations contributed to the war in their own ways. It's not a contest for who deserves all the credit. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7wwo7w/how_long_was_the_average_basic_training_for_a/du3qx90/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7wwo7w/how_l...
- jessaustin 4y ago
  Eight months seems pretty quick to me but maybe that just shows I'm not brushed up like you. Maybe I admire the Greatest Generation more than I should. The Ukrainians have had a year of war plus the preceding eight years under the Minsk Accords to perfect their technique of killing people using USA weapons, yet somehow the victory guaranteed by our war media has thus far eluded them. Our employees in Afghanistan had twenty years to learn our great training of fighting Taliban. I honestly think some of our leaders were surprised by how poorly the training went! Perhaps they will revamp some training plans! Sure call WWII an "allied victory": Stalin did. I'm not talking about "credit". TFA pretends to be a practical analysis, so I criticize it on that basis. The Soviets learned more about war than we did, and we've forgotten most of what we learned. TFA, in turn, crouches about the shins of hobbits.
  - rascul 4y ago
    > Eight months seems pretty quick to me Even less nowadays. I think I saw that infantry training in the US Army was extended in the past few years from 14 weeks to 22 weeks (including basic combat training). On top of that, both times I deployed, we had people fresh from initial entry training who hadn't been in the unit a month before we shipped out, leaving minimal time for additional training. Most of that time before deploying was spent doing various types of paperwork, processing, briefings, and other stuff that wasn't training.
toss1 4y ago
>>USA hasn't "won" a war since 1945. That result was mostly determined by USSR. You seem to have missed the fact that the USSR no longer exists; the cold war was most certainly "won" by the US, primarily by outspending, outdeveloping, and outmaneuvering the Soviets in the 'peace'. All the other wars since 1945 that you cite the US as "losing" were fought under extreme Rules of Engagement restrictions for political reasons, nothing like the terms of any more all-out war. The Taliban didn't beat us, we got bored and left, and they quickly defeated the Afghan govt which had failed to stand up (and much of which was bought out ahead of time). You also omit engagements like the Iraq war, where the fifth largest army in the world was taken out in a few weeks, with fewer than 150 US troops KIA. Someone I worked with who'd flown helicopters in-theater, told me in no uncertain terms that the main reason that the US didn't 'finish' and take Baghdad was that they didn't want the world's news to see the Iraqi carnage - literally hundreds of miles of nothing but burned out vehicles and bodies. Not exactly the US 'getting stomped'. For a current example, just look to Ukraine, where a relatively small force is decimating what was considered to be the 2nd-best military on the planet, using only 3rd-shelf inventory from other democracies. Every time the Russians get behind-the-scenes warned by the US, both on nuclear sabre-rattling and Biden's visit to Kyiv, they back down. Because they know that the half-life of their Mil in Ukr & Black Sea would be measured in double-digit minutes if the US Mil got involved. If China thought the way you did, and thought they could undermine the US or NATO, they'd have already given serious arms to Russia. They haven't even begun to do so. The principle here is that if a person or country wants to live a self-determined life with a self-determined government, they need to be better armed, prepared, and allied than any bully or adversary. The west thought for decades that appeasement would work, but Russia ended that era on 24-Feb-2022. The US mil is still the most lethal fighting force in history, and US and NATO are now rapidly ramping up. You want to challenge that head on? Good luck; you'll need it. Both Putin and Xi already know better.
- euroderf 4y ago
  > Because they know that the half-life of their Mil in Ukr & Black Sea would be measured in double-digit minutes if the US Mil got involved. Yup, if them pesky Rooskies use a nuke, the US can let rip with a mass of conventionally-armed cruise missiles and other stuff that could probably shred their battlefield C3.
prmph 4y ago
This notion that the US is somehow weak because it has seemingly not won any wars since ww2 misses something: The US has historically been held back by internal unease over human right violations and the morality of the wars. Were the US to prosecute wars like how Russia does (for e.g., in Chechenya and Ukraine) the results would likely be devastating. The Taliban did not beat the US. The US realized it was a fools errand to try to democratize Afghanistan. The fool-proof way to "fix" Afghanistan would have been to level it, lay waste to it, making it virtually uninhabitable, but that was morally indefensible.
rascul 4y ago
> USA hasn't "won" a war since 1945 That depends a lot on what you classify as a war, and how you determine the win. I don't necessarily agree with all of what Wikipedia has classified as wars, but it's certainly not zero wins in their list. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_Uni...

hash872 4y ago

Didn't the US win the First Gulf War? What else would you call that?

jessaustin 4y ago
If you win the war you get to go home. USA presence in the Arabian peninsula was cited by ObL as the reason for 9/11. Kuwait does export useful hydrocarbons, but much less than the Kingdom which could have increased production to make up for a temporary pause of Kuwait exports. The pause would have been temporary because Iraq would have restarted the export of Kuwaiti hydrocarbons as soon as possible. If anything, fighting a war disrupted the market more than not fighting it would have. A war that was fought for no reason, that didn't end before causing the most disastrous attack on USA soil since 1814, I would call "dumb".
- 123pie123 4y ago
  >If you win the war you get to go home so America lost WWII then by that logic, because they never went home?
- toss1 4y ago
  >>A war that was fought for no reason Serious ignorance, right there. The entire reason the war was fought was to enforce the principle that taking other sovereign territory by force is not acceptable. It is the same reason that we support Ukraine's fight for self-determination. You can always make excuses to allow bullies to win. As you pointed out, we didn't rescue Kuwait for their oil, which Iraq would have soon put back on the market. We — the entire alliance of free-world nations — did it, and are helping Ukraine, to support self-determination. Once the principle is established of allowing bullies and autocrats to take what they want, it will never end until they have everything.
  - jessaustin 4y ago
    The entire reason the war was fought was to enforce the principle that taking other sovereign territory by force is not acceptable. A better way for USA to support that principle would have been not to invade the sovereign nations of Cuba, Philippines, Hawai'i, Haiti, Dominican Republic, Panama, North Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Grenada, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Serbia, etc. Those are just a selection of the invasions our leaders admit. There have been far more unacknowledged actions in various parts of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, as well as violent actions that didn't include uniformed USA troops like when we paid Saddam Hussein to have a horrible war with Iran. Also there have been violent actions for which some local support could have been argued, such as when Suharto and his CIA handlers killed millions of people in Indonesia. Also we genocided American Indians for centuries. As soon as there weren't any more of them to kill, the exact same USA army officers were doing the exact same racist violence in Philippines. USA's existence is one continuous rejection of sovereignty. Crackpot realists ITT will gleefully point to my list of USA military victims and crow about "victories" in "war". Many of these were "police actions" in which there wasn't even an opposing force, just civilian victims. That's not war. Also, although every one of these actions served the someone's interests, not one accomplished a military objective that benefited the average American. That's not winning.
    - toss1 4y ago
      And, in how many of those places in which actions took place in the modern era (I totally agree with harshest of assessments of the treatment of the Native Americans) did the US, or any other democratic country, ANNEX the place and take it for their own territory? ZERO. Yes, autocratic rulers were deposed, and in some cases, 'democratically elected' rulers who were openly working with autocrats (USSR, CCP). Was any of it done perfectly? No. But fighting authoritarianism, and in some cases using our authoritarian to fight a worse one was done. I don't necessarily agree with it or disagree, in any particular circumstance, and we'd have to review each one case-by-case. But none of the incidents you cite as "whataboutism" changes the facts of the one being discussed. You even correctly pointed out that it was not for the oil. It was to uphold that principle. The same goes for Ukraine. And many of the others. Geopolitics is an ugly game. But without pushing back, hard, on authoritarians, and building a world order based on forbidding violent taking of territory as Russia is doing in Ukraine (completely consistent with its history since the 1400s). There was a lot done badly, but that is no reason to not attempt to do it better. And leaving it to the Putins, Xis, and Uns of the world will damn sure make it worse in a hurry.
pwinnski 4y ago
At the risk of becoming a guy who recommends a ten-hour podcast in answer to single questions, here's a ten-hour podcast to answer your single question: https://blowback.show/Season-1 https://blowback.show/Season-1 I would call it many things, but "a war we won" is not one of them, not at all.
- mercutio2 4y ago
  Isn’t that about the second gulf war? His explicitly stated point was about the first.
  - pwinnski 4y ago
    That is the subject of the first couple of episodes.

SlickNixon 4y ago

The Pentagon was completed in 1943. There may be some relation between your "farmboys and factory works" and the organization that occupies it now.

seanw444 4y ago

First off, India is not friends with China. They're generally aligned with the west. And also, a world war doesn't mean USA vs everyone else. It means USA+UN+NATO vs. Russia, China, and their respective vassal states. Worst case (and most likely) scenario is everyone loses. But we wouldn't be exclusively curb-stomped.

jessaustin 4y ago
India happily talks to and does business with everyone. (In Pakistan's case one might not say "happily"?) Over the last year, it has not taken part in the economic sanctions that USA and its vassals have attempted to impose. Both India and Russia have profited from this decision. We can expect India and similar nations throughout Asia, Africa, and Latin America to continue to pursue their own interests. Therefore, they will form part of our opponents' industrial base. They won't attack our forces until we attack theirs, but they won't be any more "aligned" with us than they are right now. Since much of our own industrial base is in China, our military will prosper while the rest of us will lack most human comforts. Some portion of our military will be diverted from the battlefield to curtail the resulting unrest. We will lose, much more painfully than we lost in Korea or Syria or any of the intervening wars. Alaska, Hawaii, and all Pacific territories will be gone. We'll lose most of our foreign bases. The dollar will be worthless. American-owned intellectual property will disappear. Australia will be (re-)colonized. Germany will re-militarize, and Europe will remember why that's bad. (One might expect that also of Japan, but they are probably too geriatric now.) The portion of Ukraine that Russia doesn't take will be taken by Poland. Israel will abandon us in favor of the Saudi/UAE axis, but that group will decide to coexist with regional rivals rather than follow us down the drain. USA itself might split into several pieces, none of which would be capable of the sort of excessive militarism we've inflicted on the world for the last 120 years. So, not totally bad.

TheGigaChad 4y ago

[dead]

AlotOfReading 4y ago

You should brush up a bit on your military history. The standard combat-readiness training time was 8+ months during WW2 (see [0]), which puts it quite a distance from a "quickly-assembled force of farmboys and factory workers". Similarly, the USSR's victory and WW2 as a whole is much more accurately called an allied victory. The US played a significant role in supporting soviet industrial capacity with programs like Lend-Lease that allowed them to actually fight the war. Other nations contributed to the war in their own ways. It's not a contest for who deserves all the credit. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7wwo7w/how_long_was_the_average_basic_training_for_a/du3qx90/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7wwo7w/how_l...

jessaustin 4y ago
Eight months seems pretty quick to me but maybe that just shows I'm not brushed up like you. Maybe I admire the Greatest Generation more than I should. The Ukrainians have had a year of war plus the preceding eight years under the Minsk Accords to perfect their technique of killing people using USA weapons, yet somehow the victory guaranteed by our war media has thus far eluded them. Our employees in Afghanistan had twenty years to learn our great training of fighting Taliban. I honestly think some of our leaders were surprised by how poorly the training went! Perhaps they will revamp some training plans! Sure call WWII an "allied victory": Stalin did. I'm not talking about "credit". TFA pretends to be a practical analysis, so I criticize it on that basis. The Soviets learned more about war than we did, and we've forgotten most of what we learned. TFA, in turn, crouches about the shins of hobbits.
- rascul 4y ago
  > Eight months seems pretty quick to me Even less nowadays. I think I saw that infantry training in the US Army was extended in the past few years from 14 weeks to 22 weeks (including basic combat training). On top of that, both times I deployed, we had people fresh from initial entry training who hadn't been in the unit a month before we shipped out, leaving minimal time for additional training. Most of that time before deploying was spent doing various types of paperwork, processing, briefings, and other stuff that wasn't training.

toss1 4y ago

>>USA hasn't "won" a war since 1945. That result was mostly determined by USSR. You seem to have missed the fact that the USSR no longer exists; the cold war was most certainly "won" by the US, primarily by outspending, outdeveloping, and outmaneuvering the Soviets in the 'peace'. All the other wars since 1945 that you cite the US as "losing" were fought under extreme Rules of Engagement restrictions for political reasons, nothing like the terms of any more all-out war. The Taliban didn't beat us, we got bored and left, and they quickly defeated the Afghan govt which had failed to stand up (and much of which was bought out ahead of time). You also omit engagements like the Iraq war, where the fifth largest army in the world was taken out in a few weeks, with fewer than 150 US troops KIA. Someone I worked with who'd flown helicopters in-theater, told me in no uncertain terms that the main reason that the US didn't 'finish' and take Baghdad was that they didn't want the world's news to see the Iraqi carnage - literally hundreds of miles of nothing but burned out vehicles and bodies. Not exactly the US 'getting stomped'. For a current example, just look to Ukraine, where a relatively small force is decimating what was considered to be the 2nd-best military on the planet, using only 3rd-shelf inventory from other democracies. Every time the Russians get behind-the-scenes warned by the US, both on nuclear sabre-rattling and Biden's visit to Kyiv, they back down. Because they know that the half-life of their Mil in Ukr & Black Sea would be measured in double-digit minutes if the US Mil got involved. If China thought the way you did, and thought they could undermine the US or NATO, they'd have already given serious arms to Russia. They haven't even begun to do so. The principle here is that if a person or country wants to live a self-determined life with a self-determined government, they need to be better armed, prepared, and allied than any bully or adversary. The west thought for decades that appeasement would work, but Russia ended that era on 24-Feb-2022. The US mil is still the most lethal fighting force in history, and US and NATO are now rapidly ramping up. You want to challenge that head on? Good luck; you'll need it. Both Putin and Xi already know better.

euroderf 4y ago
> Because they know that the half-life of their Mil in Ukr & Black Sea would be measured in double-digit minutes if the US Mil got involved. Yup, if them pesky Rooskies use a nuke, the US can let rip with a mass of conventionally-armed cruise missiles and other stuff that could probably shred their battlefield C3.

prmph 4y ago

This notion that the US is somehow weak because it has seemingly not won any wars since ww2 misses something: The US has historically been held back by internal unease over human right violations and the morality of the wars. Were the US to prosecute wars like how Russia does (for e.g., in Chechenya and Ukraine) the results would likely be devastating. The Taliban did not beat the US. The US realized it was a fools errand to try to democratize Afghanistan. The fool-proof way to "fix" Afghanistan would have been to level it, lay waste to it, making it virtually uninhabitable, but that was morally indefensible.

rascul 4y ago

> USA hasn't "won" a war since 1945 That depends a lot on what you classify as a war, and how you determine the win. I don't necessarily agree with all of what Wikipedia has classified as wars, but it's certainly not zero wins in their list. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_Uni...