So after Vietnam & Iraq wars does the whole world now know how to defeat the US military?

Question

And if they do, might it be a good idea to stop spending so much money on conventional weapons & start spending most of it on counter insurgency?

I forgot to mention the Pentagon's "US rules of engagement" which effectively ties one arm behind the backs of all US troops fighting in Iraq which is as much to blame for the lack of a win in Iraq as anything else.

Answer 1

you are absolutely right

Answer 2

What the world knows is that engaging the US military is NOT something you want to do.

What many in the US do NOT know is that "winning" is neither the objective nor even a realistic outcome of military operations in a STRATEGIC, POLITICAL sense. This isn't WWII, with one side of the world fighting the other, and in which the only possible outcome was a definite "win," meaning "unconditional surrender" and acceptance of the victor's terms.

It is too bad -a disservive, really- that so many politicians talk about "winning," without saying what that means. In Vietnam, we did "win" militarily in the sense that the other side got beat up worse than we did, and Nixon's Linebacker II campaign brought the North to the Paris peace table. After we departed S. Vietnam, the congress also CUT AID to the South Vietnamese who, at that time, were becoming really pretty good at dishing out defeats to the enemy. Thank Sen Kennedy for that. The result was that a defenseless S. Vietnam was overrun by a well supplied North. What we "won" was a clear statement that we will do what it takes to make communist aggression a very costly option, and, guess what -it has not been attempted since.

Same in Korea: the objective was NOT to take NK territory, remove their government, etc. The objective was to put things back they way they were pre-invasion. Matter of fact, the NK's have never admitted defeat, never surrendered, officially. But guess what -at a cost of hundreds of thousands of their own people (and many Red Chinese) they ended up with -well, you see what they ended up with. And meanwhile, SK is a prosperous Asian democracy.

Since then, Desert Storm probably comes as close as anything to a clear "win-lose" as anything we've seen. But here, too, the objective was not to take over a country but rather to make a bad guy go away. It worked -for awhile.

The simple fact of the matter is that the impact of a true global conflict such as WWII is so terrifying, that all sides to such a conflict do what they can to avoid it. And MEANWHILE, countries and even cultures can pick fights among themselves and/or with any super-power, relying on our anxiety about a broader, out-of-control, world-wide war or else simple world opinion.

And so, your premise that the US military has been defeated is simply wrong. In every unit-sized engagement, the US military wins. And that is why the enemy resorts to guerilla tactics and terror to engage us on a piecemeal basis -they know they're not going to win a military engagement.

But that leaves insurgency, and counter insurgency, the second part of your question. I'm not sure how you distinquish between weapons and counter-insurgency; it sounds as though you assume the counter insurgency efforts don't use weapons. They do, and they must, whether carried by US forces or others. And those weapons better be good ones.

It is difficult to know which side to support, since support of one means making an enemy out of the other. And, even if you know which side you're on, it is difficult to know WHO is one which side -TODAY. But that is the lot that has been cast for us and by us, for instead of wiping out the entire population, we're attempting to bring all to some kind of peace. And, as we have been warned -it will take a long, long time. "Win," simply doesn't apply in the former meaning of that word, and the sooner people understand that, the better.

Answer 3

Actually, the rest of world figured out how to defeat a super power when we defeated the English in the Revolutionary War.

We can thank Gen. Washington for reintroducing guerrilla combat into modern warfare.

By the way, we didn't lose Vietnam or Iraq. Our political leaders failed to describe what victory would look like, and failed to plan for the ensuing peace. They seemed to believe the nonsense that America can do whatever it likes whenever it likes it.

They forgot that a bunch of ragtag militia defeated the most powerful Empire the world had ever known--the English.

We need to be able to do both. Large combat operations against powerful enemies and counter insurgency measures against small but determined insurgents.

Answer 4

My guess is every military man in the world who thinks he may face a US invasion one day is sure studying pretty hard. And they should. Unless we attack China or Russia (or the other way around), few if any nations can stand up to US military power in an open fight for any length of time. The problem, as we see once again, is that simple military force alone is not enough to solve a much more complicated socio-political issue. Imagine if we were defeated militarily and a foreign force moved in to occupy. Think we'd fight an insurgent campaign?

Answer 5

You mean stop spending on super weapons, since we are still fighting the same AK-47s and RPGs we faced in Vietnam? That may sound good but without billion dollar contracts how would ball the hundreds of Generals hanging around become millionaires. They depend on fat cat jobs with defense contractors when they retire.

It isn't like the experts haven't been telling the Army for 20 years. They said we had great Armoured Units and Great Airborne Units with little regular infantry in between. The war they thought we might flounder in was Korea, where Armour is of little use.

Answer 6

Certainly not, Aristotelian!
The "whole world" does not know that much about the wars in Vietnam and Iraq. Most of the information about the war in Vietnam is from the U.S., and it is in English. Very little of Vietnam's (the PAVN and NVA) side of the war has been translated into English. Just how many people in the "whole world" understand English and Vietnamese?
How much of the "whole world" has access to this information?? Just how much do you think other countries in the "whole world" spend on counter-insurgency? I am sure the U.S. is spending more than they are. Knowing how the U.S. military fought in Vietnam (they basically won every battle), and knowing how the U.S. military IS fighting today in Iraq is no guarantee that the "whole world" would even attempt to do so tomorrow.

Answer 7

Even that doesn't solve it, however.
The real problem isn't our capabilities with regard to counterinsurgency, it is the fact that we as a nation are not of a mindset to fight the sort of long, drawn-out conflict, with no obvious signs of change, the characterizes insurgency wars.

In fact, that SHOULD be the lesson of modern warfare, not only from Vietnam and Iraq, but from the Soviet experience in Afghanistan, the French in Algeria (and in Vietnam, for that matter), The Indonesians in East Timor, etc.

There will always be native people who want to foreign forces out, so there will always be a supply of people engaging in acts against an occupying force, and they'll keep on fighting, because it's their homeland. No occupier will ever have that level of commitment, so all they have to do is keep inflicting casualties, keep the war going, and wait for the occupying nation to grow weary of the war.
And they (in whatever nation, against whatever occupying force) WILL keep fighting, just as we would keep fighting if it were our land.
In the years after the Communist takeover in Vietnam, a Vietnamese general told an American journalist that the reason his forces won was because they were willing to live in tunnels, eating only rice, for years, and keep up the fight for a generation, while they knew that the Americans, like the French before them, wouldn't be willing to suffer as much and stay as long, because it wasn't their homeland. They weren't fighting battles to take or hold territory, but to inflict damage and turn the American mind against continued fighting.

Think about it; that's how we got rid of the British. They were far more powerful militarily and economically, they had more men under arms, better training and commanders in both ground and naval service, but they weren't willing to keep on fighting forever just to hold some land on the other side of a big ocean that was of no direct importance to them.

Every other rebel force since has learned from that, and it seems that we haven't.

Answer 8

Our troops are trained to fight a standing army, the pentagon knows this yet does nothing to start training the troops to fight the type of action now being used in Iraq against us. The same thing happened in Vietnam, our generals never seem to learn! We are arrogant, because we helped win the 2nd W.W., we think this type of army can beat anyone, not so, we need to start fighting they way they do, by stealth & infiltration. Sure its dirty, but it seems to work for them so why not turn it back on them. My gut reaction is to get our troops out, now!

Answer 9

It's a matter of Powell's doctrine vs Rumsfeld doctrine. A long and painful war is only justified if the national interests are really high and tangible otherwise quick and decisive victory with overwhelming force is the real choice.

Answer 10

Actually unconventional warfare led to the defeat of England in the American Revolution.
The lesson was applied often after that.
And often it was not applied, with incredibly brutal results such as the Civil War and WWI & II.
But in the post WWII era the systematic French defeat in Vietnam made America's defeat inevitable. the formula was proven by then.
Iraq is waaaay down the line of the obvious stupidity..

The USA conventional military should be almost completely dissolved. An 85% funding cut would be perfect.

Answer 11

"War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things; the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse.
A man who had nothing for which he is willing to fight; nothing he cares about more than his own personal safety; is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself."