Few armies of great powers have ever won a war against a guerilla force that came from the populace and land the battle was fought in.
The Soviets only won on the eastern front because they were so ridiculously huge that they could manage to lose literally double german military deaths on all fronts on the one front they fought on. Without U.S. supplies and opening of second fronts, it's arguable that the Soviet advance, (if the slow, bloody, ooze towards berlin could be called that) could have stalled. At any rate, WWII was a joint effort.
Quote:
|
Vietnam was orchestrated in Washington, not by the Generals in the battle field. The military did'nt lose Vietnam, the politicians were responsible for that.
|
Exactly, by no means was the U.S. military beaten in Vietnam. Communist forces lost, by their own admission, over 1 million men. U.S. troops lost around 60,000, while the South vietnamese lost at the very most a quarter of a million, including periods where U.S. troops were not heavily involved. If that is a tactical defeat, with little to no territorial losses, then I'll eat my shoe. As in more recent events like the battle of mogadishu, a tactical sucess was made into a strategic defeat by politicians who had little stomach for war once they realized it involved men dying.
Quote:
|
With the one exception of the 1st Gulf war
|
The 1st gulf war was far less impressive, in my opinion, than the second's beginning phases, and it would have ended up exactly where we are now if Iraq had been occupied. A war is quite different from an occupation. An occupation requires more than an army, it requires a, depending on the people being occupied, level of ruthlessness most would not want the U.S. military to show.
As a side note, In WWI and, arguably, WWII, the U.S. military as we know it didn't exist. What did exist were small armies whose swelling led to a measure of chaos and unorganization in the beginning of both world wars. U.S. troops arrived in WWI just in time to turn back a massive German offensive created by the pulling out of the Russians from the war. This was in many ways the period of the most heavy and brutal fighting of the endgame, and the exhausted and overstretched British and French may not have been able to hold back the last ditch offensive, or mount the effective counter-offensive that finally convinced the germans that progress in France would never be made. While Americans never had to face the years of fighting the French and British had to, they by no means had it easy or were of no consequence in their time in the war.