Carrot of Truth
War is Peace
Russia can't beat a third world country, China hasn't won a war since WW2. Being unable to defeat an insurgency is not a indicator of how a conventional war would go.
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Media/Journalism Cringe Megathread - Hot off the Presses
- Thread starter Cherico
- Start date
Russia can't beat a third world country, China hasn't won a war since WW2. Being unable to defeat an insurgency is not a indicator of how a conventional war would go.
Russia paid off Georgia and Chechnya.
Getting beaten in Ukraine.
China lost to Vietnam after we pulled out.
China couldn't help the Norskies take the South....
sillygoose
Well-known member
Remind me how the Korean War turned out?
Yeah, the US military has mostly rested on it's laurels of winning WW2, and likes to pretend that military conflict and politics are different things, instead of a spectrum of action that bleeds into each other.
Politics will never be separate from warfare or combat, political considerations will always come out on top when it comes to military priorities, and no amount of military strength is a substiutute for a political blunders, corruption, or purposeful malfeasance in the leadership and decision making positions.
It doesn't matter how strong the US military is, because the fish rots from the head, and the head parts of the US are looking very rotten right now.
The US military may have technically had superior tech or logistics to their adversaries in many respects. But A-stan and Vietnam both proved no amount of tech advantage or money can overcome political considerations or the public not being interested in further conflict for nebulous reasons that are often more about lining certain parties pocket books or keeping certain assets (Bagram was only an hour from China interior and not much longer from Russia's interior, wonderful forward base for bombers) in US hands.
Unfortunately, because the US military has such institutional ego and pride over the accomplishments of yesteryear/WW2, that it cannot stand to humble itself to the public it claims to serve and who's wealth and standard of living the military's actions have helped destroy at the behest of DC.
LordsFire
Internet Wizard
Ironically, it would be vastly easier to defeat either Russia or China in a non-nuclear military conflict. The reason for this is actually very simple:
The Taliban were an ideological grass-roots organization that valued their theology over their lives; no matter how many leaders you kill, there are plenty more willing to take their place.
Russia and China are top-down dictatorial nations, where individual initiative and competence are strongly discouraged. If you decapitate the leadership, the entire thing implodes. If one of a handful of competent leaders below the top leadership cadre manage to maintain cohesion, you threaten to kill them too if they don't surrender. If they don't order a surrender, you follow through on the threat, and repeat until someone either gives the surrender order, or their entire military has collapsed into chaos.
The US hasn't fought a war over its own territory since WWII, and unless the Chinese manage another 20 years of uninterrupted build-up, nobody is going to have the naval power to threaten US territory (excepting the extreme end of the Aleutians) anyways. China, Russia, hell even through Japan and the UK in along with, do not have the combined naval power to threaten the mainland USA (or Hawaii for that matter). Further, with the ranges involved in modern warfare, the amount of time it takes to build new combat aircraft and military ships, and how accurate and destructive PGMs can be, if you can't push the enemy far away from your shipyards and aviation factories in the opening moves, what you start with is all you'll be getting.
Of course, all of this is moot anyways, because Russia and China are nuclear powers. The probability of large-scale conventional warfare between any of the three powers are minimal. The most that's even remotely likely, is some border skirmishing over small disputed territories, which is either shut down quick to prevent escalation, or spirals out of control into a nuclear exchange.
You apparently know little to nothing of what the US military has become and done starting with the closing phases of the Vietnam War.
No, I do, and I stand by what I've said.
Most operations since Vietnam have either been clusterfucks like Somalia or A-stan, toppling banana/oil republics like Grenada or Iraq, or limited air campaigns against 2nd/3rd rate regional/local powers like Libya or the whole Kosovo thing.
The US military mostly tries to lure in recruits with imagery and rhetoric that plays up WW2 and the glory/patriotism of US soldiers/sailors of that gen, and plays down most things after it as much as possible. There's a reason the military prefers the public not hear about things like the Mai Lai Massacre or Abu Ghrab, and tries to keep up the fiction of political neutrality; if most people could see through the bullshit, they'd have even worse recruiting numbers than they do now (which are already rather abysmal).
LordsFire
Internet Wizard
This perspective is every bit as slanted as those that lean towards 'The US military has been nothing but incredible from WWII and onward!'
You really do not seem to have any idea of how difficult or impressive crushing an 'oil Republic' like Iraq was in 1991, or how much of a turning point that was in history, especially given that the USSR had not actually dissolved yet at that point.
We didn't crush Iraq in 91, we just kicked them back across the border then left the Kurds and Swamp Iraqi's to get massacred by Saddam, and went back in 03 on a whole bundle of lies and Bush Jr. wanting to impress daddy.
I've known enough former military members who are non-to-complementary about military life or the bullshit the brass spew to know that the image the US military has of itself, and likes to project to others, is mostly about pride and ego covering up shitty working conditions and benefits, untrustworthy superiors, and pork spending. One of my grandfather's turned down an appointment to West Point after serving the USAAF during WW2, because he "was tired of taking orders from people dumber than him" and literally counted down the hours he was in service.
I've seen very little to convince me the US military is in anyway better then it was back then in terms of it's culture and mindset, and seen plenty to make me think things are in fact much, much worse now.
sillygoose
Well-known member
The bombing campaign did crush them, but the army was largely defeated by bombing the crap out of them as they were already retreating from Kuwait to get the UN to calm down and deescalate the conflict. The remainder of the ground campaign was mostly mop up with some actual ground combat being heavily asymmetrical due to the technology gap.
In 2003 they were largely ruined by the sanctions that starved hundreds of thousands of children and several bombings in the 1990s.
Pretty much matches what I've heard from people who served in the last 20 years. Any one I asked told me not to join when I was thinking about it after high school. My experiences with college ROTC was not great either.
LordsFire
Internet Wizard
...As I said, you clearly do not know what you are talking about.
I'll try to keep this description brief;
The Iraqi military was organized on Soviet lines, and used Soviet equipment. Not cutting-edge soviet equipment, sure, but an MBT is an MBT even if it's twenty years old.
The coalition forces, the overwhelming majority of whom had to be shipped from other continents and logistically supported thousands of miles from their normal bases, were very much built on the NATO model, using NATO equipment.
The casualty ration and vehicle-destruction ratio was 100:1.
One hundred to one.
That is an accomplishment the likes of which have not been seen since industrialized warfare began.
And it was happening when the Soviet Union was on the brink of final collapse, something which could very easily not have gone as peacefully as it did. Every single communist hardliner, every general in the red army who thought it would be better to make one desperate attempt to seize Europe, rather than just quietly accept the end?
They received a very, very visceral lesson that trying to push for Berlin wasn't just going to risking their lives in a last attempt to revive flagging soviet spirit.
No, it would be utterly futile. All that it would earn them was a pile of their own corpses, and a handful of the enemy's. If they managed to perform ten times better than Saddam's military (at the time one of the largest in the world), they'd still be taking absolutely overwhelming losses in exchange for functionally nothing.
So no. When you try to say 'The US military rested on its laurels since WWII,' you're speaking from ignorance, and this is just one example of that.
And you ignore that I said tech advancement and logistics are different than civie PR and recruitment numbers, which was the point I was addressing.
Having all the wiz-bang toys in the world means little if few are interested in joining and the military has bad PR with the public.
Aldarion
Neoreactionary Monarchist
As a logistical feat it was... impressive, though not overly so, seeing how most US forces were based in Saudi Arabia.
As a strictly combat feat... do remember we are talking about Iraq here. Croatian army as it was in 1995 would have likely easily beaten it.
And again, we are talking about Iraq here. It is a typical Arab military, so while being organized along Soviet lines certainly did it no favors, far more important was institutional culture.
Overall, beating Iraq is absolutely not indicative of whether the US military "rested on its laurels since WWII" or not because, frankly, outside the logistical standpoint it really wasn't much of an achievement.
Why Arabs Lose Wars
Arabic-speaking armies have been generally ineffective in the modern era. Egyptian regular forces did poorly against Yemeni irregulars in the 1960s.1 Syrians could only impose their will in Lebanon during the mid-1970s by the use of overwhelming
Why Arabs Lose Wars ….Twenty Years Later
In 1998 wrote an article entitled "Why Arabs Lose Wars." It was published in 1999 in the Middle East Quarterly (December 1999)and had been one of most read articles in the magazine since that time. It has re circulated on the internet to
www.academia.edu
LordsFire
Internet Wizard
Oh, I'm well aware that the Iraqi military performance was far from stellar. However, 100:1 is still spectacular. Maybe it's only as impressive as achieving 50:1, or 20:1 against a more competent military, but that's still an absolutely insane success rate.
And again, the role this played in the peaceful dissolution of the Soviet Union should not be discounted.
Aldarion
Neoreactionary Monarchist
Try 1:1 against a competent first-world military. Frankly, I see Russian "successes" in Ukraine as more impressive than what US achieved in Iraq.
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Chernobyl and the clusterfuck around it had far more to do with the USSR breaking up than the Gulf War did. Because the west had nothing to do with it, and it broke the internal trust between Moscow and the other SSRs.
In fact, you are the first person I've ever seen claim US performance in the Gulf War had any impact on the USSR breaking up.
LordsFire
Internet Wizard
I'm not saying it pushed the USSR to break up. That was already pretty much inevitable. I'm saying it killed the chance of any soviets trying a last-ditch 'death or glory' military offensive.
...So are you not familiar with the history of American military performance?
In every single war the US has fought since the Civil War, it has inflicted disproportionate losses on every enemy. The Spanish-American War, WWI, WWII, Korean War, Vietnam War, both Iraq Wars, Afghanistan War. Every enemy the US has fought, regardless of what size of military they have or what level of technology, the US has been better at killing them, than they are at killing us.
Now, I'd certainly say that the increasing politicization of the military has caused its combat performance and capability to be degraded, but it'd have to drop quite a bit before it would fall to the level of expecting 1:1 performance.
And in all seriousness, who exactly is going to perform to a similar level?
The Russians clearly were a paper tiger for conventional conflict. The Communist Chinese haven't won a war since their civil war ended, and they're notorious for emphasizing indoctrination over proper military training. Iran might have a better military than either of those, but not by much, and lacking in size too. Other nations we're on a rival or hostile stance to have even more pitiful and pathetic militaries.
When it comes to allied/friendly nations purely for theoretical purposes, the British have a reasonably formidable military, but it's shrunk a ton, the Aussies might match us on quality of men, but they don't have the budget for training and equipment, the NZ's don't have a big enough military to matter, the Canadians likewise...
Outside the British Commonwealth, the German military has been deliberately left to neglect, the French have a decent military, but not a peer in equipment or training to the US, much less size, Spain and Italy are at best at the level of the French, and that's about it for western Europe.
Eastern Europe, the currently-demonstrated level of Ukraine is probably the best that can be expected, but even if you go a level above that, none of them would be able to keep the US from establishing complete aerospace supremacy, and after that, the only question is 'are you willing to keep getting slaughtered for twenty years in order to just outlast the US, and do you have a neigboring nuclear power willing to shelter you?'
...About the only nation with a military record comparable to that of the US would be Israel. In that one hypothetical case, comparable losses inflicted by similar-sized formations might be reasonable. Even there though, the US military could use superior numbers to establish complete aerospace supremacy and use that and numerical advantage on the ground to still inflict disproportionate losses.
Yes, the US military capabilities in decline. It almost always does while there's a Democrat in the White House. The question is, who exactly is supposed to be able to perform at something approaching our level in the first place?
This isn't the 1980's, where the world is divided between two great powers. This isn't even the 1930's, where it's divided between six, with a number of mid-sized powers that can compete. It certainly isn't the 1900's where there's closer to a dozen.
Maybe in another two decades, if all the signs of impending doom for the Chinese economy prove false, and they can continue their economic and military build-up uninterrupted, we'll be in a multipolar world. Maybe if the Democrats manage to completely wreck the US economy and/or spark a civil war, it'll happen before then. Maybe India's continuing growth will manage to make it into the other pole in a decade or two.
For now though, there is no competitor, economically or military, in size or quality.
sillygoose
Well-known member
Not really accurate. In the WWs at best the US had a 1:1 casualty ratio despite a crushing superiority of firepower and numbers thanks to their allies. The very end of WW2 might have changed that ratio due to all the prisoner murders that were going on during the final collapse of Germany, but when the actual fighting was ongoing the US badly underperformed despite all the advantages it had, namely not having to do much of the heavy lifting, just fund others to do the majority of dying and soaking up enemy formations and firepower. Japan was similar because the US only ever fought a fraction of Japanese army strength, the vast bulk was fighting the Chinese, British, and Russians.
The other wars saw the US fighting 2nd, 3rd, and 4th rate powers, so unsurprisingly they had a massive advantage. Despite that they couldn't win in Korea or Afghanistan or really defeat North Vietnam. In Iraq they couldn't really win either and just paid off the enemy to leave them alone until they left. Of course that very expensive strategy has helped bankrupt the US and fray all of our relationships internationally.
The reality though is the US has never really fought a peer level opponent one on one, so especially today given the financial problems the US has thanks to a bunch of pointless conflicts around the world to fight 'terrorism' having to do so would be a rude shock, as the SF guys that are fighting in Ukraine are finding out; turns out fighting an actual military without air supremacy is really hard and costly. I really hope for everyone's sake we never have to find out the hard way how hollow the military really is when it comes to peer level conflicts.
sillygoose
Well-known member
How much of that was achieved during the bombing campaign, which was a function of technology, the UN being fully behind it, Iraq trying to deescalate the conflict so leaving UN forces to build up in peace, and the US being dirty and bombing a retreating convoy that was pulling back per UN demands with the expectation that they'd be allowed to do so in peace so that the conflict could be peacefully resolved?
Yeah no wonder they had such kill ratios when committing war crimes.
Oh and the bombing campaign mostly targeted undefended civilian infrastructure to collapse the economy and induce uprisings...which only resulted in them being abandoned by UN forces and killed for revolting against the government:
Doomsought
Well-known member
The moment I see PLO it the moment I doubt the veracity of warcrime claims. The middle east is chock full of perfidy where they have soldiers claiming to be civilians or use civilians as shield and even faked funerals as a form of propaganda.
Aldarion
Neoreactionary Monarchist
First, wars are not won on kill-loss ratios, they are won on achieving objectives. United States had lost the Vietnam War and in Afghanistan despite this K/D advantage.
Second, you are wrong. While I cannot claim to know data for all of these wars, German troops in World War II consistently achieved 50% greater kill/loss ratio than their Allied counterparts, including the US forces. United States also benefited from British experience, and despite that their first engagement in the war was a disaster (6 000 casualties suffered to 1 000 inflicted). They learned quickly, though, and had several good generals (e.g. Patton, Bradley) even though none were as good as German counterparts in battlefield performance. But US had mobilized later and entered war later than anyone else, so by the time that British, Germans and Soviets were starting to draw upon their last manpower and economic reserves in 1944./1945., United States were just about hitting their peak. And again, despite that, they did not achieve favorable K/D ratio.
In the Pacific, US mostly fought a naval war, and whipped the Japanese due to being able to (eventually) establish a massive material advantage. But majority of the Japanese manpower was tied down fighting the Chinese and, to a lesser extent, the British. British themselves held onto the Indian Ocean despite being massively outnumbered and outgunned by the Japanese force which had invaded the area, which is frankly more impressive than anything US had achieved.
As for the rest:
In World War I, you had American professionals against German conscripts. In such a situation, any country would have performed well. In fact, British regulars in 1914. performed better against German conscripts than US regulars did in 1918. But even in 1918., brunt of the fighting was borne by the British and French armies; US troops did not participate in significant numbers until the Marne counterattack, and even by that time were - on a unit-by-unit basis - inferior to their British and French counterparts. However, US troops and units were fresh, while Germans (like British and the French) were drawing on their last reserves, and this combined with US industry provided a decisive advantage. Even so, I have seen no evidence that US troops overall achieved favorable exchange ratio.
In Korean War, you had UN force, of which US had provided about 50% of combat troops and most of the air force. And this UN force got whipped by the Chinese army that had next to no artillery and no air force worth mention. They eventually adapted and stabilized the frontline to where border is today (mostly thanks to the Chinese overextending and outrunning their logistics), but situation was so bad at one point that MacArthur wanted to use nukes.
Vietnam war is a case study of why K/D ratios do not really matter in a war. But seriously, considering the difference in equipment and resources, not achieving favorable K/D ratio would have been weird.
Iraqi wars I already addressed.
Chinese Communists had won the Korean War against more-or-less entirety of the UN. Sure, the war militarily ended in a stalemate. But the cassus belli for the Chinese intervention was preservation of the North Korean regime, and they succeeded in that objective rather spectacularly. They also won the proxy war in Vietnam as well, though that doesn't really count by the virtue of being, well, proxy war.
And considering all the progressive BS going on in the US military at this moment, are you really sure you want to point fingers at the Chinese for political indoctrination of their troops?
Yeah, except French performance in literally everything so far disagrees with that. They performed better in Mali than US did in their own colonial adventures, and on a shoestring budget at that. And they also regularly outperformed US in exercises.
That much is true, but basically what you are saying is that the US relies on being a 500 pound gorilla in the room full of toddlers. Does not exactly inspire confidence in the US ability to handle either a peer conflict or a shoestring operation.
Yeah, and Israel had the advantage of fighting Arabs. But have them invade Switzerland, and I would not bet on Israel.
And if you had forgone that last word, I would have been able to say that you had written something correct. Because there are quite a few militaries that, in defensive operations at least, should be able to outperform the US. But we'll never know, because nobody is stupid enough to attack them.