"Why America doesn’t win wars anymore" Topic

…Dominic Tierney, a professor at Swarthmore College and the author of multiple books about how America wages war, may know the reason why.

He believes the US can still successfully fight the wars of yesteryear — World War-style conflicts — but hasn't yet mastered how to win wars against insurgents, which are smaller fights against groups within countries. The problem is the US continues to involve itself in those kinds of fights…

link

I think I could argue that the premise is flawed. Iraq is a free country now, though not as friendly to the US as we'd like. Isis has been, at least for now, destroyed. Afghanistan is dragging on, but there have been no disasters. You don't hear much about the various African terrorist groups or the Philippines. I think we're doing pretty well all told.

Because we are corrupt and in denial?

I strongly agree with his statements: "One difference is that we cannot easily see the enemy. In an interstate war, the enemy is wearing uniforms, we know where they are on a map. In a counterinsurgency they are hiding in the population. "

If we need to fight North Korea for example, we park one nuclear submarine off their coast, push a couple buttons and their military capacity is gone. But trying to fight "armies" that blend in with the civilian population is a another ball game.

And hasn't that always been a problem for everyone? Nothing new here…

I agree. Who has ever been able to defeat this type of enemy? Stalin, perhaps, by killing everyone whom he thinks *might* be an enemy of his "State". I do not see any other means of defeating such an enemy. Truth be told, this type of (Stalin) "war", always ends badly for everyone, including Dear Leader.

Ben Franklin is quoted as saying, "You can be free, or you can be safe, but you cannot be both." I agree with this, completely. Airport security has increased, limiting our freedoms, in order to make us safer (not "safe", but, "safer"…). Freedom comes with great risk; security comes with few freedoms.

Until they perfect mind reading machines, there will be no certain way to defeat terrorists, particularly, homegrown terrorists. Cheers!

Nothing particularly new or revelatory in this discussion. Insurgency conflicts are similar to Vietnam, "police actions" that are Pyrrhic victories at best. We can't win wars like we did in WWII because we no longer can win the hearts and minds of people.

I took a different view of Sgt Slag's Ben Franklin quote: Ben Franklin is quoted as saying, "You can be free, or you can be safe, but you cannot be both."

I don't have the context in which Mr. Franklin said this, so I may be way off base. But I took it to mean you have to take risks for freedom. If safety is your primary concern, you won't gain your freedom or keep it. For the colonists in what is now the USA, getting their freedom in Franklin's time was not the safe rout to take. They risked everything to get it.

Tom

Franklin actually wrote:

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

There was no surveillance technology in Franklin's day. He was writing about a tax dispute between the Pennsylvania legislature and the Penn Family during the French and Indian Wars. The legislature wanted to tax Penn family lands to pay for defense. The Penns wanted to donate a single lump sum in exchange for the legislature's acknowledgement that it did not have the right to tax the Penns.

Thus Franklin was telling the legislature, if you take the lump sum you are buying some temporary safety but giving up your governmental right to raise revenue by taxation, and that would be a very bad deal for you and the people of Pennsylvania.

We don't actually cure diseases any more, either. We just treat them. Pharmaceutical companies make more money selling drugs to customers for their entire lives than just selling a single course of treatment.

War has an element of that, too. Weapons makers, producers of medical supplies, electronics manufacturers, vehicle manufacturers, and others sell more product in wartime than in peacetime. Part of the economy depends on the government transferring money to the private sector through purchases of these products. So winning a war would be losing the peace.

Thus Franklin was telling the legislature, if you take the lump sum you are buying some temporary safety but giving up your governmental right to raise revenue by taxation, and that would be a very bad deal for you and the people of Pennsylvania.

Interesting, though I must admit it sounds counter-intuitive since people usually think of "liberty" as a right not to be unduly taxed by the government.

@28mm Fanatik: Here is a pretty good summary (better than anything I wrote as a history major 40 years ago):

link

If the premise is correct, it could be because we lack
a current-day Bad Hand (also called Ranald Slidell
Mackenzie)…

Sgt Slag said: "Who has ever been able to defeat this type of enemy?"

The Commonwealth forces against Communist insurgents in the Malayan Emergency were able to do it.

It's where the "hearts and minds" doctrine came from and why the Australian SAS were initially a step ahead of American special forces in 'Nam.

As ever, I quote Abraham Lincoln ' The best way to destroy an enemy is to make him a friend'.

"The Commonwealth forces against Communist insurgents in the Malayan Emergency were able to do it."

Very small insurgent force that was not ethnically part of the main population made it different than any insurgencies that have been brought up earlier in this thread. Plus, it ended in 1960 but started up again in 1976 and went on until the end of the '80s.

Fighting insurgents is always about making the … let's call them "civilians" like your side more than they like the insurgents. Or at least hate your side less than they hate the insurgents!

This isn't easy to do in highly tribal places, where they don't like ANYONE not of their tribe, but will band together against outsiders. Places like anywhere east of the Jordan River.