Comment by pdonis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pdonis | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> which still failed in basically everything from Vietnam onwards

Dropping bombs didn't fail in Vietnam. It succeeded. North Vietnam was defeated militarily. They only took over South Vietnam after the US Congress snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by withdrawing funding so the US troops had to leave.

> The claim that the US will beat any country isn't backed by any evidence. At all.

Certainly it is. Given a clear objective, the US military has achieved it in every case. The reasons that the US often fails to capitalize on such victories are political, not military.

> the Gulf War? Which just ended up leaving Saddam in power

Because removing Saddam from power was explicitly not a military objective in that war; the military objective was to drive Iraqi forces out of Kuwait, and that objective was met.

When the US decided it did want to remove Saddam from power, in the second Gulf War, it succeeded. Again, the reasons why the aftermath of that war became a debacle were political, not military.

Americans were fighting in Vietnam for about a decade. Bombing was already at high levels in 1965. America pulled out a decade later.

The idea that bombing was working and political issues were the only reason America failed aren't supported by any facts. Saying politics were the issue is mostly used merely an unfalsifiable statement.

If the goal of the wars are redefined to some really narrow goal like just eliminating Saddam, which is revisionist at best, it seems like sending in troops when one targeted bomb on a political event would've worked better is a big oversight. The invasion just caused chaos and more trouble and we still haven't gotten ourselves out of it. Afghanistan is also total chaos, 20 years later. Military might sure isn't helping there.

In most recent conflicts, the winners are generally people with motivation to fight and unpredictable attacks. Sending in aircraft carriers and deploying 50000 young guys to a place they don't know or care about is neither unpredictable or fueled by any deep motivation. People handed a gun and taught how to make a bomb and acting to protect their family from foreign invaders are both.

It seems probably maybe you would actually agree with the OP. They would say, "given no interference from politicians the US Military would win" and you might say "yes but politicians always interfere, there's no such thing as 'no interference'"

Any of the situations you highlighted all have restrictions set by politicians, not military. For example full military might hasn't been released in Afghanistan. The politicians restrict what the military is allowed to do there. I'm not saying that's good or bad. In my un-informed opinion we shouldn't be there. But you can't claim it's the military losing there when the military is not allowed to actually use all its power and resources.

Wars aren't fought by militaries who want to demonstrate the latest military toys (one hopes, at least), but to achieve policy objectives. So of course the politicians decide what the military is allowed to do. Unless we're talking about a military dictatorship, though in that case it's maybe more accurate to say that the military high command has taken over the policy functions of the state rather than the military existing in some magic policy-free environment.

Or to quote von Clausewitz: "War is not an independent phenomenon, but the continuation of politics by different means."

The politics define what 'victory' is though.

I mean, politics defined the objective for Vietnam as limiting the spread of communism and proscribed the only way in which the US could certainly have achieved that objective and 'won' the war militarily (nuke the entire population). So yes, it defined the terms of their failure, but I'm not sure one can meaningfully claim victory without politics anyway. Politics also defines the temporary grounds on which the US can be said to have enjoyed temporary and limited success (enabling a separate South Vietnam to persist whilst they were present, considering South Vietnamese losses tolerable in context)

But the military element is clearly a large part of that political failure. The US military didn't feel they could win the war on the terms they'd been given without calling up 2 million conscripts, and couldn't eliminate the Viet Cong quickly enough for the public to tolerate this, with military setbacks like the Tet Offensive strongly influencing the political shifts.

Nah, America was losing Vietnam. It couldn't be won the way it was fought. That country is no slouch. Within three decades they fought off three world superpowers. Veteran soldiers, local knowledge, sympathetic populace, terrain advantage.

None of America's aims could have been achieved there meaningfully.

Big guys lose to small guys all the time. Sometimes you've got to know how much it's worth risking. Britain was a world hegemon. Still lost to an upstart collection of colonies.

> Veteran soldiers, local knowledge, sympathetic populace, terrain advantage.

And lots of aid from the USSR and China. Aid from two superpowers sure helps in fighting one superpower.

> None of America's aims could have been achieved there meaningfully.

It depends on what you think those aims were. The aim of preventing South Vietnam from being taken over by North Vietnam was achieved militarily; then the US Congress threw it away.

> Big guys lose to small guys all the time.

Big guys lose to small guys that are being helped out behind the scenes by other big guys all the time, yes. If the small guys have no help from other big guys, then no, the small guys pretty much just lose.

> Saying politics were the issue is mostly used merely an unfalsifiable statement.

Not at all. There are plenty of historical treatments that clearly document the political issues that prevented the US from capitalizing on its military victories. For example, see H. R. McMaster's book Dereliction of Duty.

It is true that much of the blame lies with military leaders; McMaster's book makes that clear. But the reason for that is that those military leaders were acting like politicians, not military leaders; they were telling elected politicians what they wanted to hear, instead of telling them the military reality. Politicizing the military does not do either the military or the country any good.

> If the goal of the wars are redefined to some really narrow goal like just eliminating Saddam, which is revisionist at best

That was the military objective, and it was achieved. No redefinition at all.

The political objective was never clearly defined, which of course is not a recipe for success.

> Afghanistan is also total chaos, 20 years later. Military might sure isn't helping there.

If you ask the military to do a political job, and don't even clearly define what the political job is, of course they're not going to be able to succeed. That's not the military's fault. It's our political leaders' fault (and our fault as citizens for allowing them to get away with it).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com