Why America Loses Every War It Starts | Hacker News Reader

Why America Loses Every War It Starts

defenseone.com

17 pointssmacktoward15 comments

Can we first define what winning a war and losing a war mean?

If we're talking about politically, yes we've lost the politic wars. The reasons for that are straightforward. We don't care what the local populace wants or realistically needs.

Militarily, we destroy the people we designate as enemies easily and without a problem. Most wars of attrition are easy to win when you've got the bigger gun and more people.

We need to stop thinking of wars as chess matches and start thinking of them as 4x games where the populace actually matters and gaining hearts and minds is actually important.

What exactly counts as "starting a war"? The Korean war is mentioned here as an example, but that war was started by the Korean communists when they invaded South Korea on June 25, 1950. The United States UN-sanctioned involvement was a reaction to that. Does that really count as "starting a war"?

The media (and the author of this book) love to portray America as "stumbling" into yet another conflict. Here's a great thread with numerous examples of this: https://twitter.com/adamjohnsonNYC/status/878006629802713089

Oops, we accidentally were forced into invading another country and building another permanent military base. The "enemy" leave us no choice!

The purpose of these wars is not to "win" in the traditional sense, but rather to ensure US business interests are being protected around the world. And by that metric, Vietnam, the "Cold War", both Iraq wars, etc. have been successful.

The purpose you may see is not to “win” in the traditional sense, but American Presidents including Trump talking about winning wars and defeating the enemy. Most people know these conflicts are about business interests and resources, but they portray them to the public as a battle to protect our freedom and security at home.

Many of our politicians act like America is simply the victim protecting itself from people that are setting out to attack us. They don’t mention the American businesses that our military basically acts like a security force for.

Could you elaborate on how the Vietnam War succeeded in "protecting US business interests around the world"?

In my view, first, the Vietnam War has little to do with "business interest," more with containing the spread of communism.

Second, the Vietnam War did not succeed in containing communism. After the US's withdrawal, North Vietnam took the entire country, and North Vietnam allies came to power in Laos and Cambodia.

So I'd count the Vietnam War as a big loss in terms of containing communism, and a neutral in terms of protecting US business interest.

> Second, the Vietnam War did not succeed in containing communism

Sure it did, or at least it helped. As with many conflicts of that era, North and South Vietnam were proxies for the U.S.S.R. and the U.S.A.

Note that the U.S.S.R. no longer exists. It's been completely eliminated from the face of the earth. That counts as winning, by most standards.

Vietnam started the process of bleeding them dry, and Afghanistan finished it.

Among other dubious things, they seem to be using “lose” to include what most people would see as “win with less speed and/or greater cost and/or less expansive goals than what some armchair generals speculate could have been achieved with an alternative strategy in the same circumstances.”

Granada? Kosovo? Panama?

Nobody remembers the ones the US won quickly. They "don't count as real wars".

Granada and Kosovo were both covered in the article.

> The Second Iraq War, launched in 2003, was rightly termed a fiasco. Even far smaller interventions — Beirut and Grenada in 1983, Libya in 2011 — failed.

And the article is wrong. The Second Iraq war was not a fiasco - what followed was. We needed to either occupy, in force, for a decade or two (like we did Germany and Japan), or we needed to just say "We got Saddam, bye". We tried to do nation-building on the cheap, and that failed. The war itself was very successful.

Grenada failed? By what standard is that true? That seems completely disconnected from reality. It removed from power a government that was trying to establish itself as a dictatorship, "disappearing" those who were opposed.

And still no mention of Panama.

So I'd say that, yes, the article mentions some of them in a way that tries very hard to find the negatives so it can paint them as failures.

Irak war was also a political loss, and the "reconstruction" (almost alone, without inviting former iraki interest holder, like Total, or emerging country like Russia and/or China) was a moral, political and tactical mistake, and made the US loose a lot of cultural influence imo, at least in France and Germany. But i agree that the confirmation bias in the article is obvious.

>It took Bill Clinton 78 days to force Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic to stop the killing of Kosovars through a bombing campaign that, if accompanied by the threat of ground forces, might have done the job in hours.

I think a common argument against a ground war at the time was that it took the German Wehrmacht 30 divisions to "pacify" the Balkans. Even then partisans (e.g. Josip Tito) were making life miserable for the occupation.

Defenseone is a good read for this kind of thing. People should also check out Sofrep.com. I don't really always agree with their politics, but they have some great posts/articles from people actually involved in hot spots around the world.

>Donald Trump, fortunately, has not suffered a crisis such as 9/11, his strategic judgment and understanding seem as

>poor as or even worse than his predecessors’.

Here is how he can win. Just don't engage at all. Unfortunately his speech on Afghanistan was not reassuring. Just more of the same.

The title is the title of an upcoming book, the caveat being since WWII. The author does not argue that we actually* lost the Revolutionary War.

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