"Modern Western Forces Too Small to be Effective?" Topic

A few nights ago I watched a documentary about an EOD unit in Afghanistan. In one mission they team up with infantry to clear a desolate road leading to a small village and meet with local elders about Taliban activies.

They spend most of the day inching along the road and blowing up IEDs. They reach the village near night fall, spend a few minutes talking with the elders, and then get attacked. So they mount up and return to base.

Soon they hit a newly planted IED on the road they just cleared and get attacked again by the same guys from the village attack. Evetually they escape down the road which will undoubtedly be sewn with fresh IEDs.

That scenario and its variations played out repeatedly in Iraq and Afghanistan. Even during the "surges" western forces could only manage to establish isoltaed bases and conduct roving patrols. At no time did they have enough troops relative to the space and population size to decisively control the situation.

As one of my relatives said, it was like his time in Vietnam. All you control is the ground in line of fire of your weapons on patrol. Once you pass by it's like you were never there.

Have modern forces become so expensive and so small that they simply can't acheive a decisive, sustainable long term victory in a major war? We're not talking about killing things. We're really good at spening $100,000 USD to kill an ISIS fighter and his Toyota pickup truck.

We're talking about the ability to invade even a nation like Iraq with over 500,000 soldiers to totally control the situation through a totally dominate occupation that provides peace and security 24/7 for the population.

It just seems impossible today.

Which then raises the issue, if you accept that reality then what are you left with and is it enough? It appears that we're left with the ability to destroy critical infrastructure and massed convnetional forces with ease. That could "topple" a regime. But it leaves the battle space in chaos and never secure enough to be restored as happened in post war Gemrany and Japan.

BTW…this is cross posted to cold war and WWII because the topic informed by past experience and still relevant today. Were the forces of WWII the last time they were "cheap" enough that we could afford a massive occupation force?

This probably could be cross posted to scifi for discussion of Ewoks vs Storm Troopers too! :-)

The size of the Army will make no difference. The U.S. had almost 600,00 troops in Vietnam at the peak of deployment and it changed little (that we knew of at the time).
It's the nature of fighting an insurgent enemy. The only way to really win is get wait for 2 or 3 generations of reeducation to change the insurgent's way of thinking, or for them to just get tired of fighting.

Well phrased question.

No, small pro forces can and will snot large conventional forces in conventional wars but it's also circumstantial to who you're fighting. Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan are defined by their counter insurgency nature, which are nasty, nasty fights to wage (as history shows us time and again) and win.

The modern western democracies most of us come from have very strong taboos against roughing up non combatants both within our militaries and wider society, which isn't a bad thing at all, but it's also being exploited by our enemies. We either take the "hearts and minds" approach or those useless "surges", neither of which have great results. But without those taboos there are a variety of strategies that can be effective for short periods of time.

Toppling a regime isn't the same as defeating nation states (which we did in the case of Germany x2 and Japan).

Occupations of territories with a significant number of inhabitants hostile to foreign occupation, and a majority staying neutral, is likely to end in failure. This has been true since WWII, not just today. The west is no longer going to act the conqueror as in days past. Its not just numbers.

Armies are good at 2 things: killing people and breaking stuff. They are not designed to 'spread <insert government of choice>', 'keep the peace', or anything else.

When both sides have that mind-set, like in WWII, they control the area because the local population understands that the invading army will kill people and break stuff. The local population doesn't want that to happen, so they 'behave'.

In our modern conflicts, at least one side does not have that mind-set, and at least one side doesn't care if people get killed or stuff gets broken.

It's not the size of the forces involved, it's the psychology and ideology of the forces involved.

I think part of the problem stems from western forces trying to fight an unconventional war with conventional forces. You can have the best highly paid crack troops in the world but they are of little use against a determined foe who is happy to use suicide bombers , who isn't bothered about collateral damage and even killing innocent people with the same religious beliefs.

What I am trying to say here is that spending more on intelligence instead of conventional forces may be a way forward .

It also depends on the conflict we could have "Won" in Iraq had the military been left in charge. In the first few months the people of Iraq were very happy to have been liberated and expected thier lives to be Better. I Blame Ambasador Bremmer who was clearly out of his element and the rest of CPA.. The Firing of the Iraqi Army must be seen as the single act that lost us the peace..With the assistance of the Iraqi Army we could have secured and restored the infrastructure one province at a time and left Iraq with a Win…I was there.

If the enemy want you gone bad enough, they're always going to outlast you, because in the end, they're willing to die to get you out of their country and you are not willing to die to stay in there.

Perhaps to put a finer point on the issue, are modern western forces too small for "total war" in the sense of the American Civil War and WWII in which you not only destroy conventional enemy forces but you also apply so much force relative to space/population you can impose your will on the population?

In both the ACW and WWII there were minor insurgencies post war. But they never took root like thise in Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan.

A related question: are modern forces too expensive and fragile even for convnetional warfare against a major power?

Look at the unit cost and materials required for modern gear like the F-35 and even a modern MBT. In a fight against someone like China their economy would collapse without western trade and our own military relies on strategic metals mined in China.

Such factors may be restraining the dogs of war in Europe with Russia and western Europe so co-dependent. That's not to say that a guy like Putin might not overreach and miscalculate Europ's relunctance for war.

Perhaps today war has become "economics by other means" and is simply another cost-benefit calculation by the wealthy who control our governments.

In the "olden days" of muskets and such things armies needed every able fellow to contribute to the fighting. The killing was done mostly by the soldiers and the other arms like artillery were pretty much secondary. This changed when modern technology allowed every squad leader to be able to call in fire support by radio. In modern armies the boots on the ground and their guns are there to make sure the guy on the radio gets in the right spot to call for an airstrike or artillery barrage.

WWII was the peak of the "big Division" type warfare. A few brigades are now supposed to be able to do the kind of job whole corps would be used for.

We're now seeing the old "Everyone is prepared to fight the last war." We are finally starting to learn the lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan. Everyone is converting their army to fight extended insurgency style conflicts where the worst dangers are peasants with IED's and AKs, riding in a Toyota.

And now the risk of a Cold War style clash is looming, people are kicking themselves in the back because we dropped all the corresponding hardware …

George Washington figured this out back in the Revolution. Keep a mobile force large enough to gobble up any small enemy garrisons. This forces the enemy to keep his troops concentrated, meaning that the local countryside belongs to the rebels. Then just hang on until the invader gets tired and goes home.

I agree with Trance on Iraq- we won the war, and then completely lost the peace.

It's really dangerous to draw simple analogies from past conflicts. Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan are very different conflicts with very different sets of circumstances.

In Vietnam, the ROE were such that we never were really allowed to fight the enemy head on. There was no ground assault of the enemy stronghold in the North and the air assaults that did occur were managed in such a way as to nearly guarantee failure. Had the US invaded and kicked out the NVA, I'm not so sure it would have ended up like Afghanistan since the villagers in the South were being terrorized by the Viet Cong and later NVA and really didn't want to support either the corrupt government in the south or the government in the north that simply wanted to force them into conflict. Of course, had the US invaded the North, there's no telling how China or the Soviets would have reacted, so that's a whole other can of worms. Frankly, we shouldn't have been there in the first place, and we could have avoided the whole thing had we backed Ho Chi Minh in the first place in 1919 (a little known fact is that he appealed to the US for backing first and only went communist when we refused to back him).

Afghanistan has been the definition of quagmire for long before the US ever got there. Why we thought to stay there after a successful initial campaign is beyond me.

I believe in something I call the Spear Theory of military power. A spear is great for striking hard and fast, but if you stick a spear into an enemy and just leave it there, eventually the spear will dull and corrode, and if the enemy isn't dead, he'll strike back.

An elite military has no business being an occupying force. If you want that, create a police and occupation force trained for that function. Since occupation isn't the goal of most western nations, then we should avoid any kind of situation where that is a long term requirement for victory.

Maybe its' time to resurrect the idea of punishment expeditions, to keep the "enemy" governments to weak to threaten us and ours. It would play to our strengths, and if our adversaries remain tribal, we probably should consider that for the best.

No one can stop terrorism, and we probably have to just accept that there will be horrible individual assaults on citizens throughout the world, but we can make governments think twice about weapons of mass destruction, at least for the near future.

Politics are going to drive success on the battlefield. In Vietnam we were given the mission of winning hearts and souls rather seeking out and destroying the enemy. In Irag and Afghanistan, the enemy knows we are leaving so they can do limited attacks. Even at this point they know they have won. We lack the political will to destroy the enemy. Based on this, it is time to leave.

Bang your drum this didn't need to be cross posted to WW2 or CW.

I agree with Zargon. This stuff is OK in the ultramodern board but will clog up the WW2 discussion board needlessly.

Can it be 'decrossposted'?

Bang your drum this didn't need to be cross posted to WW2 or CW.

Totally disagree.

The topic is informed by our experience in WWII, demonstrated by events during the cold war such as Vietnam and the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, reiterated by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and has implications for force structures and strategy well into the future.

Those TMP'ers who understand WWII and the Cold War history can certainly contribute to the discussion. Just look at the pre-war debate by those who cited WWII experience while planning for the invasion of Iraq! It's ludicrous to say that the two have nothing in common militarily.

To Bill Rosser's excellent point above, the "punishment expedition" approach and the "Marshall Plan" approach are two ends of the military spectrum for total war.

One simply requires the ability to utterly destroy an enemy on the battlefield as well as his national command infrastructure (while leaving his civilian population as unscathed as possible…otherwise we'd simply nuke them).

The other requires vast armies and prolonged deployments over many years.

So the topic definitely spans the entire period. The only reason not to post to virtually all forums is that we're talking about the unique costs and features of mechanized warfare which is different from the Roman occupation of places like Palestine or the Norman conquest of England.

In some ways we've often conducted punishment expeditions during the Cold War when we've removed (assassinated) heads of state who have displeased us or sponsored coups against them. But that was on a small scale (no military involved) and we left a friendly care-taker government in their stead. WWII was the ultimate punishment expedition when we destroyed our enemies' capitols and put many of their leaders on trial.

And it goes a step further and assumes we can't, for whatever reason, use that stealthy approach and instead need to kick down the door, break all the china, and make the civilian population reconsider their support for a regime not friendly to our interests.

Darwinian and brutal to say the least but that's the way it has been done throughout history. The Marshall plan and "reconstruction" after the ACW were outliers.

So the umbrella topic is "the cost and sustainability of total war" and the question is how it's implemented in the 20th century and early 21st.

Trance, as another who was there I agree 100%! We also had a commander in
7 Armd Bde who put a plan together to take Basra and stuck to that plan despite the amount of political pressure being put to bear. And it worked, with fewer casualties on both sides than had he bowed to the pressure.

And plenty of eyes raised to the roof of the HQ when we were suddenly told that as a Bde were were taking on a DIV AOR. There were tons of ammunition that we had neither the resources or time to deal with. As for disbanding the Army and police what a **** up!

Tally Ho!

This TED talk had some interesting things to say about the future of American military strategy. Thomas Barnett divided roles into two groups – stong military – great line – "I like my soldiers 19 y.o. and a little ed off" and strong non-force component (soft force). He makes an excellent point (also made by others in this tread) that we have perfected the military force option – we can destroy anything with a handful of soldiers backed up by tech but that these are the wrong guys for winning the long game.

link

It also depends on the conflict we could have "Won" in Iraq had the military been left in charge. In the first few months the people of Iraq were very happy to have been liberated and expected thier lives to be Better. I Blame Ambasador Bremmer who was clearly out of his element and the rest of CPA.. The Firing of the Iraqi Army must be seen as the single act that lost us the peace..With the assistance of the Iraqi Army we could have secured and restored the infrastructure one province at a time and left Iraq with a Win…I was there.

That's a really good point. We could have used the Iraqis as a surrogate occupation force to help enforce the post war peace since we lacked the numbers. Worse still, we turned them from potential partners to opponents. Could have been a "Sunni Awakening" several years early and prevented thousands of casualties. Great insight Trance!

Didnt the French have the exact same problem in the Peninsula/r?

A related question: are modern forces too expensive and fragile even for convnetional warfare against a major power? Look at the unit cost and materials required for modern gear like the F-35 and even a modern MBT.

Two points:

First: Per-unit costs are high, but the overall cost of a military is way down since the Cold War ended. In the 1980s, western states were spending 5-10% of GDP on their militaries and the Soviet bloc was spending something insane like 20-25%.

Nowadays it's rare for a democracy to spend more than 3% of GDP on defense, and 1-2% is more typical.

Adjusted for inflation, and as a percentage of GDP, are militaries really so much more expensive today?

Secondly: modern all-volunteer forces demand to be compensated in various ways long after their service is over, with lifetime benefits, education credits, lifelong medical care, etc. In a country like America where you don't have a national health system or much of a welfare state, the biggest large-scale welfare programs are for your military. Every new carrier battlegroup you create, means tens of thousands of people who get those lifetime benefits, over the decades that those platforms are active.

In other words, there is a financial incentive to keep forces smaller, because the long-term costs of personnel are so high.

I'm sure Romans were making this same complaint as barbarians swarmed their mile fort.

Garth,

Those benefits are only needed for those who serve in combat or retire. They deserve the benefits for putting their lives on the lines. To many people want to take those benefits away but refuse to put the uniform on to help out.

@paulgenna:

I certainly have no objection to veterans' benefits. I'm pointing out, however, that there are long-term financial reasons why most advanced nations prefer smaller militaries. In America this is painted in greater relief because unlike your allies, you don't already have a national health system, so providing health care to veterans represents additional public expense.

I do wonder if per-unit costs, as a share of overall spending, would increase if overall spending increased. For example: if you went back to your Cold War levels of military spending (@7% of GDP), would that represent lots more of those expensive gadgets (thus bringing down per-unit costs), or would it mostly be devoured by personnel costs?

That is why you only use your sledgehammer on stuff that needs a sledgehammer and not a hammer. Or in other words don't use it if you don't have to. I will let you read between the lines on that.

It's less a matter of the size, than the rules of engagement which handcuff the troops.

Sort of disagree Mako. Soviets operated in Afghanistan with absolute brutality and still lost.

OTOH, to your point, during WWII we ruthlessly bombed civilian targets to degrade military production and it seems to have had some value. And Japan finally surrendered when faced with total atomic annihilation.

And then there's Sherman's march to the sea and destruction of my current home town, Atlanta, to secure his rear.

ROE can certainly hurt PURELY military objectives. But they can also support ultimate war objectives by not turning the entire population against your troops.

To All:

Modern military forces are too small to fight large scale conventional wars or to effectively occupy and police hostile territory after invasions abroad. So the answer to VIS's question is yes.

Why this has come to pass is a complicated question and includes political dimensions which are not appropriate for discussion on this forum. High costs of training, very high costs of equipment and extremely high legacy costs stretching over 4-7 decades are one dimension. Another dimension is that the nature of war and the purpose of war has changed dramatically in the minds of our political elites since the end of the Cold War. Again these changes are political in nature and therefore outside the purview of this forum.

The role of the military now has morphed. The traditional role of defending a nation's territory and population is now achieved more by arsenals of nuclear weapons, naval and air forces, national militias and treaty systems which create nuclear umbrellas under which non-nuclear states can shelter. The conventional military's job has changed in emphasis from national defense into foreign intervention. These foreign interventions may have many raisons d'ętre but large among these is being the shock troops which force political and economic change on nation states and groups which don't behave by the rules of international behaviour imposed by powerful blocs of super-states (super powers and regional super powers) within their spheres of influence. Conventional forces serve two roles in this capacity. One, they provide a military shock which traumatizes targeted states and populations into accepting rules and economic programmes which they would otherwise never accede to. Two, the military and the private corporate military adjuncts use war as a justification to spend tax dollars and thus transfer wealth from the tax payer and the state into the private ownership of corporations supplying war materials and supporting military operations.

While the Truman Doctrine may have been at the core of intervention in Vietnam, no such argument can be made for the two Gulf Wars and the invasion of Afghanistan. These wars were driven by economic policies and political/military priorities were always secondary. The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and the 9/11 attacks were pretexts for war but not the reasons for war. The reasons were economic and to a lesser degree political. The First Gulf War was likely an orchestrated event (see April Glaspie's speeches just before the Iraqi invasion) and the invasions of Afghanistan and the Second Gulf War took advantage of the shock of the American people to embark upon foreign adventurism aimed at transferring wealth from tax payers to private hands. Had the Coalition and NATO been serious about punishing those behind 9/11 then an invasion and regime change in Saudi Arabia would have been the correct action, not invading Afghanistan and then Iraq.

The modern professional military is more a tool of foreign policy than a tool for waging war and is unsuitable for waging high intensity war or total war. It is a weapon to be used as a shock to catalyze change in reluctant states or populations. A danger we will soon face is when the powers that be make the moral and mental leap to use such military forces on their own populations to shock us into new behaviours. Then we will have truly crossed the Rubicon into an age of neo imperialism where rule by oligarchy and timocracy are once again the norm.

Well that turned out to be a lot more political than I originally intended!
Sorry if I have offended anyone, but it seems this topic is impossible to answer without discussing the political schema which controls military funding and priorities.

Cheers and good gaming.
Rod Robertson

It seems to me the failing in Iraq was to do with the idea that we could go in and get out and achieve our goal quickly. We have been in occupation in Germany ever since 1945. In Japan for the much the same length of time. In South Korea since the 1950s. We should have understood that we were going to have to stay there for as long as it took to achieve our ends. A century is a nice start for purposes of calculation. But even that should not be our limit. We should have understood that we were finally in a position to be able to exert real influence in the Middle East through our presence there. Instead our short sightedness has lead to a multitude of problems that need not have happened.

I have to generally agree with Rod … things have change for many reasons … since '45 or even '53 …

WWII was a somewhat unique case compared to today. The western forces did not have an insurgency to deal with.
Italy – Occupied areas could be left to the local police for the most part.
France – All of it could be left to local police.
Germany – Once taken it required minimal forces to keep an area passive.
Japan – Easiest occupation in history considering how hard they fought (might even be able to take off the qualifier).

"Maybe its' time to resurrect the idea of punishment expeditions".-- Bill Rosser

I strongly advocate this idea it plays to our strengths of conventional warfare. We arrive and destroy their conventional forces and military industrial capacity then leave. There is no costly prolonged insurgency. The civilian population survives relatively intact along with the infrastructure to support them. We need to stop with concepts of regime change and nation building it cannot be applied to all conflicts.

I would have to say if we are going to fight in places like Afghanistan then we should not, "Drive up the road and talk to village elders…" We should conduct aggressive patrolling and hunt the insurgents with techniques from the Ranger handbook. We just have to kill more of them and outlast them. I believe that is the key to winning instead of occupying areas.

The issue in Iraq and Vietnam isn't the military. It's the inability of the electorate to play the long haul — had we stayed in Iraq, there would be no ISIS. If we'd bombed the NVA when they attacked after the peace accords, they'd have lost.

(Check out some of the interviews with NVA generals — they had no real army left, and thought their bosses were nuts. Militarily, they were — but they played the gambler, not the hand.)

It's less a matter of the size, than the rules of engagement which handcuff the troops.

That's what soldiers always say. Yet when let loose with no rules of engagement, they always demand more troops as the solution. They are soldiers, so see all issues as being solved by military means.

It was those "handcuffs" that prevented the Korea War going nuclear. Because if the soldiers had had their way, it would have. (It nearly did anyway.)

It was those "handcuffs" that prevented the US from invading North Vietnams and starting WWIII.

Even when specifically not allowed to do things soldiers will -- such as using torture or taking little care about civilian losses.

One of the absolute prerequisites of a democracy is that the soldiers do not establish the rules of engagement. The country sets its foreign policy rules, not the military.

If the US military was not "handcuffed", what would prevent it from behaving like the Japanese up to and during to WWII?

In WWII we fire bombed Japanese and German cities on a massive scale and they still resisted us.

We (the US) dropped more bombs on Vietnam than were dropped in all of WWII. And we still lost at a strategic level.

The Soviets savaged Afghanistan and still lost.

We took out the Iraqi army, Iraqi leadership, and their infrastructure and still couldn't control the population.

We removed the Taliban from power using specops as FOs for bombers and Northern Alliance as ground troops but still couldn't reform the replacement government's corrupt and brutal ways.

As Army Secretary John McHugh said this week, we still need ground troops to seize and hold ground. But too many are focused on firepower alone and not on the mass of troops needed for true security. We are ignoring the lessons of WWII during which German and Japan withstood massive fire bombing campaigns directed against their civilians/cities. It still took infantry in massive numbers to force their defeat.

"Army leaders vent: We still need ground forces"

"Unfortunately we have well over a century of historical evidence to indicate that if your opponent has strong will, and is cagey and cunning, they are likely to dig in and withstand bombardments from afar," Milley added.*

link

*Which is why this is cross-posted to WWII and CW…it's all related and even the military sees that relationship! :-) Looks like knowledge of history is not all that strong on TMP. ;-)

Maybe in WWII and Korea it was the adversaries were tired of fighting. This was certainly the case with Italy and even Germany. Japan had no real ability to extend the war. North Korea was pummeled and short of China's help was completely beaten. The Taliban is not a formal government so troops really come and go as they want. If they need time off then they go home and our troops cannot bother them. ISIS is drawing in tens of thousands of youth to come and fight for them. Their in humane killings probably keeps anyone from being able to leave. most are caught and killed so the others stay.

As I usually say, if both sides are shooting civilians, how can you tell who the good guys are?

True, VIS, but the Germans and Japanese lost, and ultimately surrendered in WWII.

In Vietnam, their reservoirs weren't taken out, and a lot of targets were off limits, e.g. supply ships, SAM sites for a long time, enemy air bases, etc., etc..

As WWII has shown, if you want to win, you have to be brutal to the other side.

Anything less and you lose.

Brutal in war, but generous in peace.

A glaring difference between post war Japan/Germany and places like Vietnam, Iran, Afghanistan, and Iraq is that we supported brutal governments which used violence and corruption to rule. And now we're pushing the same thing in Iraqi Kurdistan by pushing for direct support of the Barzani crime family.

And I would point out that Germany and Japan did NOT surrender in the face of conventional fire bombing which was the definition of brutal (some have called fire bombing cities a war crime). Germany didn't surrender until their capitol was taken by overwhelming force AND it became clear that we weren't going to engage in mass slaughter. Some German soldiers even helped to root out pockets of resistence!

Mark Plant

It's less a matter of the size, than the rules of engagement which handcuff the troops.

That's what soldiers always say. Yet when let loose with no rules of engagement, they always demand more troops as the solution. They are soldiers, so see all issues as being solved by military means.

It was those "handcuffs" that prevented the Korea War going nuclear. Because if the soldiers had had their way, it would have. (It nearly did anyway.)

It was those "handcuffs" that prevented the US from invading North Vietnams and starting WWIII.

Even when specifically not allowed to do things soldiers will -- such as using torture or taking little care about civilian losses.

One of the absolute prerequisites of a democracy is that the soldiers do not establish the rules of engagement. The country sets its foreign policy rules, not the military.

If the US military was not "handcuffed", what would prevent it from behaving like the Japanese up to and during to WWII?

You are making some real very broad bush statements here. You seems to lump all "soldiers" in one bag, which is not true. You seem to really know little or understand how the many soldiers think. We are not all mindless butchers who ignore the GC, etc. … Very, very few actually are …

This is why I think the US needs to build 3 or 4 different division/brigade types. One type is for full-on World War 3 (current Heavy Brigade). The second type is for long-term occupation and peacekeeping (current Infantry Brigade w/ MRAPs). The last is to provide heavier fire support to the lights, and act as manpower support to the heavies (current Stryker).

It's possible that the current Stryker brigades will need to split into two different types to do those jobs.

Somewhat ironically, the Heavy Brigade can probably use minimally- or unarmored logistics vehicles, while the light brigade needs to have all armored/MRAP logistics support.

"One of the absolute prerequisites of a democracy is that the soldiers do not establish the rules of engagement. The country sets its foreign policy rules, not the military."- Mark Plant

There is a difference between establishing foreign policy and strategy or tactics. We have seen the effects of incompetent arrogant civilian leadership that cannot tell the difference. If you sent the military you probably are looking for a violent solution to a failed foreign policy. I say let the military do its job with minimal civilian interference and that job is to defeat the enemies of our nation.

This is what happens when Ultramodern spills over on to the front page. I don't know whether to laugh or cry.

Well, it hasn't worked out very well when the non-military guys set the ROEs and attempt to micromanage the wars from afar now, has it?

We seem to always lose when that happens.

Surely, that's just a coincidence though, right?

There is a difference between establishing foreign policy and strategy or tactics. We have seen the effects of incompetent arrogant civilian leadership that cannot tell the difference. If you sent the military you probably are looking for a violent solution to a failed foreign policy. I say let the military do its job with minimal civilian interference and that job is to defeat the enemies of our nation.

Agreed …Again Mr. Plant needs to actually talk to real soldiers … not just what he read in books, novels, saw in movies, video games, comic books, etc. …

Dragon Gunner was in the 82d ABN and I the 101 Air Asslt, 2ID and 197 Mech … we were kind'a like real live soldiers …

The mistake in Iraq was not questioning the wmd evidence. To put it another way.
Going in.
Once there, employing the Iraq military would have fed those men and removed their incentive to blow stuff up etc. They could also have quelled unrest.

The mistake with Afghanistan was ignoring the fact nobody seems to be able to win there. To put it another way.
Going in.

The British public seemed to have learnt the lesson common to both. Hopefully the US has as well and we don't end up in Syria.
I gather the kurds would be quite grateful for some hardware and maybe a bit of training.

What happened in Iraq was that we needed to roll a 5+ but we used those blue dice that always roll bad, and we got a 4.

The mistake with Afghanistan was ignoring the fact nobody seems to be able to win there. To put it another way.
Going in.

Actually, it was going in without a distinct objective. There is a myth that Great Britain lost all three Afghan Wars – it didn't. There were two disasters (the Retreat from Kabul and Maiwand) at the start of the 1st and 2nd Wars, which were the result of the Afghans reneging on an agreement and a failure to spot the Afghans were creating a regular army, respectively. Both wars ended with major Afghan cities being captured and punitive measures being put in place that kept the Afghans quiet for a long time without the need for any occupation (the 3rd War involved the Afghans invading India, in which they were defeated). Not long, long-term successes, but definitely not failures.

As I have said before on other posts … IMO, The USA made two very large strategic errors in recent times. Of course hindsight is 20/20 …

1) Supplying the Muj vs. the USSR … they should have been left to bleed each other out. And maybe UBL and his cronies, etc., could have died by Russian hands. Before they became such a threat. Add trusting the Paks to that situation.

2) GWII … we all know how that turned out, in the not so long run.