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Comment by austincheney | Hacker News Reader

The last time the US was involved in anything resembling actual warfare was Vietnam. I can say this as somebody who has been in the Army for 23 years and deployed 5 times. The risk of traditional warfare is astonishing low because the costs are too high and the superior modern force moves too fast. You have to keep in mind 10x more people have died in the Mexican drug conflict than all the years the US had been in Afghanistan.

Those things said I find it strange that anytime somebody mentions investment in revision of military tactics or technology somebody cries about some unrelated moral ambiguity from some value vacuum.

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> The last time the US was involved in anything resembling actual warfare was Vietnam.

I'd count the First Gulf War as the last conventional war the US was involved in, although the Iraqi army did not prove up to the task of actually fighting a modern army. If you consider wars the US hasn't fought in, Russia's invasion of Georgia is probably the last conventional war, although again, it was pretty one-sided.

There was a large scale conventional war between Azerbajan and Armenia that just ended today. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Nagorno-Karabakh_war

Azerbajan won. https://edition.cnn.com/2020/11/09/europe/nagorno-karabakh-s...

I was in the Army for 7 years and deployed 3 times. What does "actual warfare" look like? If what I experienced wasn't war, what is? You are minimizing the sacrifices that we and our combatants have made which is, quite frankly, disgusting.

The risks related to traditional warfare are incredibly high, not low, and risk will continue to grow as technology becomes the strongest variable in military dominance and success. Simply put, from now and well into the future, lethality will become greater. We can kill faster and with greater accuracy than we ever could in the past. Our capacity to kill is there -- just restrained.

The situation in Mexico [and further south for that matter] is dire and probably incredibly similar to that of Afghanistan after the Russians left. The cartels are the law. There is no effective form of government in Mexico.

I suppose it is drawing a distinction between warfare (strategic engagement) versus combat (tactical hostilities). For example Mogadishu was a battle not a war.

Huh. Not my son's experience. He did convoy duty. Three times they encountered bombs causing death and dismemberment. Mortar attacks on their camp were a daily occurrence. His turret on the vehicle he was gunner for resounded with the pings of small-arm fire.

Twice he survived mortar attacks - one exploded on the wall behind the staff during morning assembly in the yard. Another crashed through the roof on the other side of the wall when he was in the phone room talking to his Mom.

It took years for him to finish surgeries and physical therapy at the VA. His college degree took extra years to complete because of it.

I imagine 'actual warfare' is pretty rough then.

That 10x figure doesn't sound right to me. Between the Taliban and government forces, Wikipedia says there were over 130,000 killed. Have over a million Mexicans died in the drug war?

Otherwise, (as I assume) you are comparing foreigners killed in Afghanistan to Mexicans killed in Mexico, which doesn't seem like a fair comparison.

Technically, Afghanistan has been in a continuous state of warfare since 1979 the most bloody of which were the civil wars of armed militias around Kabul in the early 90s although the Soviet invasion was pretty unconcerned with collateral damage. The Taliban eliminated that and arguably saved many lives in the process. In the broadest since the entirety of the Afghanistan conflicts easily stretches into millions dead, but I was only speaking to the US conflict.

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