War is not won by kill count otherwise the confederates and Nazis would have won.
You keep giving the same answer Zach would give or other soldiers “we did not lose on the battlefield we lost because of politics.”
It does not matter you also missed my other point. The one questioning the value of the Army and having such a large one. You want to make your army large enough to fit your goals not as big as possible. The purpose of the Army is to protect the rights of Americans especially from foreign invasion. For example they fought for independence in the revolution and 1812. In the civil war they fought for freedom of black Americans. If they lost those wars either America would not exist or black Americans in the south would be slaves with no rights. Those wars were necessary if they would be lost the effects would be catastrophic. People tried to make the same arguments for Vietnam and Afghanistan “Dey hate our freedoms.”
Well those wars were lost yet we did not lose our freedoms from those countries. That shows me those wars were unnecessary after all we are not under Sharia law, the Army was not made to support an empire that is what its current budget seems to be. Because if the goal is to maintain hegemony and Imperial dominance then yes the funds are at the right amount of possible even too low. But if our goal is merely to protect our rights and independence as a nation we are paying too much.
This is a fair point about Afghanistan. After the point had been made in retaliation for the Taliban hosting Al-Qaeda, we should have gotten out of there.
Not so for Vietnam. The Cold War
was a war, it was fought across the whole globe, and the perception of weakness created by American political surrender in Vietnam resulted in many believing that the USSR was stronger than the USA and NATO. It's why shit like the Iranian hostage crisis happened, and if leftist defeatists and traitors had continued to hold the White House and congress through the 80's, things would have gone very differently.
It wasn't until the
utterly crushing triumph of western powers in Gulf War 1, over the soviet-model Iraqi military, that the perception of weakness left by Vietnam was fully dispelled.
We do not need to 'take and hold' any territory that is not US territory already.
I tried to give you the benefit of the doubt, but you are determined, again, to still think like a leftist.
Who do you think is less likely to declare war against the USA, or a US ally, a nation/dictator that knows we have no ability to occupy their capital, and in fact would have to recruit and train an army from scratch, or a nation/dictator that knows that within 48 hours we can have a Brigade on-site, and within a week a full-fledged invasion can be under way?
What do you think detered the Russians from attacking Estonia, Latvia or Lithuania? They're both smaller nations than Ukraine, more easily occupied, and with territory that the Russians want. Unlike with Ukraine, sheer size disparity
would be completely overwhelming, like it was with Georgia, and they'd also be able to link up with their Kaliningrad Exclave.
I'll tell you what deters the Russians:
Knowing that the US military would come and kick their faces in if they tried it.
NATO allies would certainly contribute, but the Russians are not intimidated or scared of the Poles, the Germans, the Brits, etc. Smarter Russians know not to dismiss them out of hand, but it is the
American military that is the primary muscle behind the alliance.
'But muh nukes!'
If you are weak to conventional conflict, there will be people who will seriously consider throwing the dice that you won't start a nuclear exchange if they 'just' take a bite out of a minor allied nation.
'Surely President Biden won't escalate to nuclear force just because we invaded Estonia!'
Given the historic weakness and cowardice of every Democrat in the WH since JFK, they'd probably even be right. And if you have
no response available except nuclear, then every conflict is all-or-nothing.
It's been 32 years since the USSR dissolved, and
absolutely nothing that has happened since then has suggested that conventional armies are obsolete. Strategic nuclear weapons change the calculus of war, but they do not obsolete every other part of the war machine.