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America has lost every war in the recent past.

by H8crilA 6mo ago

edgyquant 6mo ago
It hasn’t. There hasn’t been a war in centuries where America didn’t obliterate its opponent. It loses politically because its people don’t want war, but it’s defeated militarily everyone it’s engaged with.
- myrmidon 6mo ago
  If you can not win a war because your population is unwilling to bear the cost, then you are still unable to win (that is in fact a very typical way for a war to end). Nobody is disputing the fact that the US spends more money on arms than anyone else and has the shiniest of toys as a result, but "winning" in war is about effecting the outcomes that you want, not about whether your weapon systems are superior. The US military has clearly failed to deliver the outcome that Americans wanted in many recent conflicts (Vietnam, Taliban); counting those wars as "lost" makes a lot of sense.
  - roncesvalles 6mo ago
    One of the reasons to do a war is to simply show the enemy that you are able and crazy enough to go to war with them over whatever grievances you had. This is called strategic deterrence. You are making the folly of thinking of war like lawsuits, where one side wins and the other side loses, and the losing side goes home with nothing. This is not so. If you're walking home from work and some person tries to mug you, even if they are unsuccessful, that will permanently change your behavior as if they had successfully robbed you anyway. Maybe you'll change your route. Maybe you won't walk and drive instead.
    - voganmother42 6mo ago
      “A Kourier has to establish space on the pavement. Predictable law-abiding behavior lulls drivers. They mentally assign you to a little box in the lane, assume you will stay there, can't handle it when you leave that little box.” - Snow Crash Is it strategic deterrence, or just being so unreliably and inconsistent that insider information becomes more valuable? Is it strategic to demonstrate a lack of planning or that you are a poor ally incapable of garnering support (either domestically or abroad)?
    - myrmidon 6mo ago
      You can both "win" or both "lose" if your goals are not in direct conflict (rare). I'd argue that the most important thing when trying to win wars is to aim for realistic outcomes. The first gulf war was arguably a win because of realistic goals (get Iraq out of Kuwait and stop them from invading it again), while most other interventions in the region were basically "designed to fail", and unsurprisingly never achieved anything of note (and the problem was not lack of military capability).
    - protocolture 6mo ago
      Yes but if you spend some billions of dollars to replace the Taliban with the Taliban, you have only demonstrated that you are willing to make your own citizens suffer with diminished resources for no outcome. >If you're walking home from work and some person tries to mug you, even if they are unsuccessful, that will permanently change your behavior as if they had successfully robbed you anyway. Maybe you'll change your route. Maybe you won't walk and drive instead. In global politics, this tends to make you want to increase your defenses so it doesn't happen again, and find local partners for that defense. This usually comes at the cost of US influence, not its increase. Like Iran is looking at its current situation and going "The literal only deterrence we could have to prevent this is to develop a nuclear capability. The US cannot be trusted to deal with, and it is pointless to try." A nuclear Iran can now only be avoided by scorched earth. Scorched earth will now just cause an already partly US hating population to hate them more and create matyrs. Theres no possible upside to this conflict.
      - roncesvalles 6mo ago
        With Afghanistan, I think people fixate on the fact that the Taliban is still there and while that's true, Al Qaeda has completely been wiped out (except fringe groups that have adopted the name) and OBL, the person most responsible for 9/11, was successfully killed by an attack launched out of Afghanistan. The current Taliban and whatever terrorist groups remain in that region no longer have an interest in hurting the US directly. The current Taliban is also very different from the one in 2001, almost geopolitically flipped in some ways (allied with India instead of Pakistan, and almost certainly responsible for majorly disrupting China's OBOR project in that region, another win for the US. Not to mention, 20 years of no Taliban. An entire generation of Afghans grew up without being under a Taliban government.
- data_maan 6mo ago
  https://www.worldatlas.com/us-history/wars-the-united-states-didn-t-win.html https://www.worldatlas.com/us-history/wars-the-united-states...
- afthonos 6mo ago
  The term of art for losing politically is “losing”.
- senderista 6mo ago
  War is fought to achieve political objectives. If those objectives are not achieved then it is only fair to say you lost the war.
kasey_junk 6mo ago
Has anyone “won” a war in the recent past? In the old fashioned sense that they conquered something and used the newly acquired resources to make their own citizens lives better? The problem with the post ww2 world is that the old definition of winning a war no longer holds. You just don’t see wars of conquest very often and they don’t seem to work when they happen. The closest I can think to winning off hand is a few of the colonial civil wars. Vietnam for instance won in the sense that they outlasted the US and have a nominally communist government but it is not an outpost of the Soviet Union and it’s a major trading and tourist partner of the US. Iraq is not led by a belligerent to the US dictator and Afghanistan isn’t home to training camps for terrorists dedicated to attacking the US (yet). These were all extremely stupid, expensive and inhumane military actions. But the US never went into them to hold territory. So “there until we got tired of it” is as close to winning as it was ever going to be.
- roncesvalles 6mo ago
  The Gulf War was a decisive victory, if you consider that recent.
- H8crilA 6mo ago
  Yes, winning a war means achieving your political objectives. For example Iran wins this war even if they maintain the status quo. And they are on track to get even more, like obtaining ownership over the strait.
  - kasey_junk 6mo ago
    Then by the stated aims going in the US “won” both wars in Iraq.
    - dlisboa 6mo ago
      Some of them. These were the stated objectives as per general Tommy Franks: * Depose's Saddam government Accomplished. * Identify, isolate, and eliminate Iraqi WMDs Failed. They were never there. * Find, capture, and drive out terrorists from Iraq Failed. Iraqi-based terrorism increased in the aftermath. * Collect intelligence related to terrorist networks, and to "the global network" of WMDs Failed. North Korea tested its first nuclear weapon in 2006, years after the invasion. The US accuses Iran of trying for them to this day. Chemical weapons were used by ISIS. * End sanctions Accomplished. * Deliver humanitarian support to the Iraqi people, including the displaced Failed. There were more displaced people due to the war than before and a higher need for humanitarian support which took years to complete. * Secure Iraq's oil fields and resources, "which belong to the Iraqi people" Accomplished. Somewhat, US and UK based companies, plus China, now runs a lot of their oil fields. Iraqi GDP per capita is one of the lowest in the region. * Help the Iraqi people "create conditions for a transition to a representative self-government" Arguable. Parts of the country want to secede and have armed groups. Representation and turnout is not amazing, but I guess not even in Western countries it is.

America has lost every war in the recent past.

by H8crilA 6mo ago

America has lost every war in the recent past.

It hasn’t. There hasn’t been a war in centuries where America didn’t obliterate its opponent. It loses politically because its people don’t want war, but it’s defeated militarily everyone it’s engaged with.

myrmidon 6mo ago
If you can not win a war because your population is unwilling to bear the cost, then you are still unable to win (that is in fact a very typical way for a war to end). Nobody is disputing the fact that the US spends more money on arms than anyone else and has the shiniest of toys as a result, but "winning" in war is about effecting the outcomes that you want, not about whether your weapon systems are superior. The US military has clearly failed to deliver the outcome that Americans wanted in many recent conflicts (Vietnam, Taliban); counting those wars as "lost" makes a lot of sense.
- roncesvalles 6mo ago
  One of the reasons to do a war is to simply show the enemy that you are able and crazy enough to go to war with them over whatever grievances you had. This is called strategic deterrence. You are making the folly of thinking of war like lawsuits, where one side wins and the other side loses, and the losing side goes home with nothing. This is not so. If you're walking home from work and some person tries to mug you, even if they are unsuccessful, that will permanently change your behavior as if they had successfully robbed you anyway. Maybe you'll change your route. Maybe you won't walk and drive instead.
  - voganmother42 6mo ago
    “A Kourier has to establish space on the pavement. Predictable law-abiding behavior lulls drivers. They mentally assign you to a little box in the lane, assume you will stay there, can't handle it when you leave that little box.” - Snow Crash Is it strategic deterrence, or just being so unreliably and inconsistent that insider information becomes more valuable? Is it strategic to demonstrate a lack of planning or that you are a poor ally incapable of garnering support (either domestically or abroad)?
  - myrmidon 6mo ago
    You can both "win" or both "lose" if your goals are not in direct conflict (rare). I'd argue that the most important thing when trying to win wars is to aim for realistic outcomes. The first gulf war was arguably a win because of realistic goals (get Iraq out of Kuwait and stop them from invading it again), while most other interventions in the region were basically "designed to fail", and unsurprisingly never achieved anything of note (and the problem was not lack of military capability).
  - protocolture 6mo ago
    Yes but if you spend some billions of dollars to replace the Taliban with the Taliban, you have only demonstrated that you are willing to make your own citizens suffer with diminished resources for no outcome. >If you're walking home from work and some person tries to mug you, even if they are unsuccessful, that will permanently change your behavior as if they had successfully robbed you anyway. Maybe you'll change your route. Maybe you won't walk and drive instead. In global politics, this tends to make you want to increase your defenses so it doesn't happen again, and find local partners for that defense. This usually comes at the cost of US influence, not its increase. Like Iran is looking at its current situation and going "The literal only deterrence we could have to prevent this is to develop a nuclear capability. The US cannot be trusted to deal with, and it is pointless to try." A nuclear Iran can now only be avoided by scorched earth. Scorched earth will now just cause an already partly US hating population to hate them more and create matyrs. Theres no possible upside to this conflict.
    - roncesvalles 6mo ago
      With Afghanistan, I think people fixate on the fact that the Taliban is still there and while that's true, Al Qaeda has completely been wiped out (except fringe groups that have adopted the name) and OBL, the person most responsible for 9/11, was successfully killed by an attack launched out of Afghanistan. The current Taliban and whatever terrorist groups remain in that region no longer have an interest in hurting the US directly. The current Taliban is also very different from the one in 2001, almost geopolitically flipped in some ways (allied with India instead of Pakistan, and almost certainly responsible for majorly disrupting China's OBOR project in that region, another win for the US. Not to mention, 20 years of no Taliban. An entire generation of Afghans grew up without being under a Taliban government.
data_maan 6mo ago
https://www.worldatlas.com/us-history/wars-the-united-states-didn-t-win.html https://www.worldatlas.com/us-history/wars-the-united-states...
afthonos 6mo ago
The term of art for losing politically is “losing”.
senderista 6mo ago
War is fought to achieve political objectives. If those objectives are not achieved then it is only fair to say you lost the war.

kasey_junk 6mo ago

Has anyone “won” a war in the recent past? In the old fashioned sense that they conquered something and used the newly acquired resources to make their own citizens lives better? The problem with the post ww2 world is that the old definition of winning a war no longer holds. You just don’t see wars of conquest very often and they don’t seem to work when they happen. The closest I can think to winning off hand is a few of the colonial civil wars. Vietnam for instance won in the sense that they outlasted the US and have a nominally communist government but it is not an outpost of the Soviet Union and it’s a major trading and tourist partner of the US. Iraq is not led by a belligerent to the US dictator and Afghanistan isn’t home to training camps for terrorists dedicated to attacking the US (yet). These were all extremely stupid, expensive and inhumane military actions. But the US never went into them to hold territory. So “there until we got tired of it” is as close to winning as it was ever going to be.

roncesvalles 6mo ago
The Gulf War was a decisive victory, if you consider that recent.
H8crilA 6mo ago
Yes, winning a war means achieving your political objectives. For example Iran wins this war even if they maintain the status quo. And they are on track to get even more, like obtaining ownership over the strait.
- kasey_junk 6mo ago
  Then by the stated aims going in the US “won” both wars in Iraq.
  - dlisboa 6mo ago
    Some of them. These were the stated objectives as per general Tommy Franks: * Depose's Saddam government Accomplished. * Identify, isolate, and eliminate Iraqi WMDs Failed. They were never there. * Find, capture, and drive out terrorists from Iraq Failed. Iraqi-based terrorism increased in the aftermath. * Collect intelligence related to terrorist networks, and to "the global network" of WMDs Failed. North Korea tested its first nuclear weapon in 2006, years after the invasion. The US accuses Iran of trying for them to this day. Chemical weapons were used by ISIS. * End sanctions Accomplished. * Deliver humanitarian support to the Iraqi people, including the displaced Failed. There were more displaced people due to the war than before and a higher need for humanitarian support which took years to complete. * Secure Iraq's oil fields and resources, "which belong to the Iraqi people" Accomplished. Somewhat, US and UK based companies, plus China, now runs a lot of their oil fields. Iraqi GDP per capita is one of the lowest in the region. * Help the Iraqi people "create conditions for a transition to a representative self-government" Arguable. Parts of the country want to secede and have armed groups. Representation and turnout is not amazing, but I guess not even in Western countries it is.