Finally, the fact that you think the 1993 Battle of Mogadishu was some kind of humiliating defeat for America shows that you are operating on vibes, not anything remotely connected to reality. Depending on what sources you believe, casualties inflicted ran somewhere between 20:1 and *200:1* in the US's favor, and the objective of the raid, hitting a group of the local warlord's leadership, was successful.
It is a testament to the incredibly high standards of military performance generally expected of the US military that the whole operation was considered a mess, even though it achieved its objective and inflicted massively disproportionate casualties. You practically never will actually get it, but we train and expect our military to be aiming towards accomplishing all objectives with zero casualties.
The US kicked ass in that battle, and the whole affair was yet another example of how the US military with very few exceptions wins absolute crushing victories in the field, but incompetent Democrat political leadership doesn't know how to actually accomplish anything meaningful with that.
You keep doing this thing throughout this entire thread where you act like that as long as the US wins battles, that that means that the US will win whatever war it's in. It's German General Staff thinking. Acting like you can avoid politics in war when war is a political animal is completely nonsensical.
You are a black-pilled doomer.
Even if we assume the overall competence of the US military has been in free-fall across the Biden administration, it still will not have fallen to the level of the Russian paper tiger. We simply do not have a completely institutionalized culture of lying and graft the way that they do, and four years isn't long enough for that to develop.
You asked for my worst-case scenario, I gave you my worst-case scenario. A more realistic scenario is that the special forces bumble around Mexico for a year or two, kill a cartel leader, kill some civillians as collateral damage, piss off Mexico who thus decides to distance itself from the US further, declare victory, go home, and the cartel goes right back to doing what they were doing. A somewhat enlarged example of the Pershing expedition or some inner-city SWAT drug raid for the successes those things had. First as tragedy, then as farce.
Okay, I'll lay it out in simple terms:
"Via a combination of killing cartel leadership, destroying key cartel infrastructure, and weakening the cartels compared to the Mexican government, seriously damage their ability to both operate and recruit. Ideally, this will break the current cartels, and a resurgent Mexican law enforcement will cripple such criminal operations long-term. Practically and more plausibly, this will establish a serious deterrent, making it clear to cartel leaders, both survivors and new leaders of new cartels in the future, that if they do not want to personally die, they will operate as quietly and non-violently as possible."
I, and most others who support the idea, don't have some fantasy-land conception that 'go blow up the baddies' is a magical solution to current problems. We do think that major criminal organizations having a very clear understanding where they are on the pecking order is a good thing. Arrogant and overconfident thugs will casually commit crimes against property and people. Intimidated criminals will try to operate quietly out of the way, making their money by selling illicit goods where they won't be noticed, because they know that if they are noticed, that is a bad thing.
You've submitted something. Good job. But there's a contradiction in this, and there's a big problem in
Trump in particular doing this.
Deterrence, which is what you're going for, doesn't work just one time and especially not in a scenario like this. When one punishes a child to make him not do something, it's not just the punishment that deters him. It's the fact that the child knows that if he does it again, he will be punished. It's about credibility. As another example, it's pretty well accepted that criminals are not so much deterred by the severity of the punishment as they are by the chances that they will get caught. If one thinks he won't get caught, the severity of the punishment is irrelevant.
And the problem is that Trump can't do this expedition more than once. What's he going to tell the public? "I did this controversial raid into Mexico one time. Now, only a couple years later, I need to do it again because the cartels are acting up again." It's obvious how the general public would react.
This is further exacerbated by two things. First is the fact that even if the cartels are convinced that Trump will do it again, will they be convinced that the next president, Vance or whoever, will? After all, Trump is unusual. Everyone admits that. As ridiculous as I admit it sounds, Kamala Harris doing a raid like this into Mexico would have more deterrent value than Donald Trump doing it.
Second, Mexico may be willing to back a one-time incursion to deal with the cartels (though I doubt it). There's no way that they're going to accept that happening on a routine basis.
In summation: your expedition, no matter how terrible or how fierce it is, has no deterrent value whatsoever. The only deterrent value is if you can somehow promise that you're willing to do this expedition again and again and again. But no one, Trump nor his successor, has the political chops for that. But I did forget how you think that politics are utterly irrelevant to military strategy.
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