| Title | Why US Army Keeps Losing Wars | |
| Date | Wednesday February 18 2015, @05:04PM | |
| Author | janrinok | |
| Topic | ||
| from the but-an-army-marches-on-its-stomach dept. | ||
The online analysis magazine Pieria runs an interesting piece on why the world's biggest military force keep losing wars. So far it identifies the following reasons, which I'll tersely enumerate and quotes snippets (just for teasing) and strongly recommend you read TFA in full (it makes a good read):
More than three-quarters of Americans in Iraq didn’t fight.
... Pecan pie, sweet ice tea, lobster and steak on Fridays, all shipped halfway around the globe. The logistical tail was wagging the combat dog.
Since the interpreter just made up what he thought his bosses wanted to hear, the Marines were operating with negative intelligence.
... The moral: don’t invade a country if you are too lazy to learn the language.
The American military is deeply committed to force protection, to not losing soldiers.
... Despite apparent American strength, its enemies know if they have a little patience and inflict a little pain, the Americans will probably leave.
Fifty thousand Americans died in Vietnam. So did more than 2 million Vietnamese. If war were a numbers game, America would have been victorious.
...Lyndon Johnson only went to war because he feared being accused of “losing” Vietnam by congressional Republicans.
Angell observed that no German personally profited from the annexation of Alsace in 1870.
...If their primary interest was oil, American diplomats would have told Saddam to grant exclusive contracts to select oil companies and he would have gladly complied in order to avoid invasion. But Bush, Cheney et al weren’t really interested in Iraq’s oil but rather in an opportunity to demonstrate America’s awesome military power, in order to cow the rest of the Middle East and the world beyond. It didn’t work out as they had hoped.
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printed from SoylentNews, Why US Army Keeps Losing Wars on 2024-04-29 00:06:34