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Comment by hef19898 | Hacker News Reader

hef19898

Asymetric warfare is very different from the near-peer conventional warfare we see in Ukraine.

One cannot occupy a region milotarily if a large enough portion of the local population is hell bent to oppose that accupation. That's what happened in Vietnam and Afghanistan.

Ukraine is what happens ofnthe imvasion force is met by defenders capable of stopping the invasion. And the war in Ukraine cannot be fought with low tech weapons, heck, everything older than the Vietnam War won't cut it anymore.

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Actually no, it is not what happened in Vietnam and Afghanistan. In Vietnam there was constant foreign infiltration by the enemy and they used quite nasty "tactics" to gain local influence. Afghanistan is not much different. In principle the side that was more willing to instill more terror into local populace won.

The same problems of logistics also do apply to the local opposition. If you run out of weapons or ammunition then you are done. If your supply lines are cut then you are done. It is also the main reason why the two wars mentioned were lost - incapacity of political will to cut the enemy supply lines.

The best rebuttal I've heard to this line of thinking is: "Some say we lost Afghanistan because we weren't willing to be brutal enough. Well, the Russians were willing to be brutal enough, yet they also lost Afghanistan."

I don't think so why there is this underlying assumption that Russians were "brutal", but when USSR took their forces from Afghanistan, they actually left a secular regime there that has survived for a few years and actually significantly outlived the USSR itself.

Maybe it would hang around longer if USSR was intact and assisting.

Possibly, but Russia internally felt that they lost. And this was significant contributing factor to the collapse of their empire.

I think it was different and more like the Vietnam fallout, "with the new reconassiance data, it turns out we fought against ourselves"

The idea which ended both wars was that continuing this war is a war crime against our own nation even as we continue to score victories.

USSR simply ran out of resources to continue the war. They would have happily continued if they could have been able to afford it. In the end the country had dire deficit of even basic everyday items including food. But similarly to the Vietnam war it was not able to "sell" the losses to their own people, especially on the occupied territories (Soviet Republics), where it was seen as another Russian expansionist invasion.

> especially on the occupied territories (Soviet Republics)

A majority of these republics were founded by the USSR by carving them out of RSFSR, without the regard of wishes of people who ended up split by these borders.

I guess its karma when USSR wanted to be the example of affirmative action socialist state ran by ethnic minorities, only to get framed for imperialism by the autonomous republics it has created.

I'm not sure we are talking about the same thing. I'm talking about Soviet Republics (SSR) post WW2 e.g. the occupied territories that were not in RSFSR.

These "autonomous" republics were anything but autonomous. They were autonomous within the very strict framework provided by Russia. Puppet states would be the closest description, but even then not fully accurate. On top of this there was no need for Russian help to "create" these fake republics. Nations were completely capable to create their own governance like was for example the case with Ukraine. All what Russians did was to use the cover of communism to continue their imperialist ambitions.

RSFSR contained ASSR (Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republics) and these had even less autonomy. Most of these nations should have also been given the opportunity to have statehood as they wanted.

If you were talking about ASSR before WW2 that were transformed into SSR then again, see the previous point.

I don't believe you have the full context and reading Wikipedia on the subject will yield a lot of surprises.

USSR got the following bits and pieces after WWII:

* Kaliningrad, added to RSFSR

* West Ukraine, added to Ukrainian SSR

* Some ex-Polish lands added to Belorussian SSR (Poland get even more of better, ex-German lands though)

* Baltic states

* Tuva.

Of these, perhaps three Baltic republics were not happy about Afghanistan (and everything else), but they were quite small.

The rest of stuff, such as UkrSSR, BelSSR, Caucasus and Central Asian SSRs, were carved out of RSFSR (Russia) in the 1920's by the USSR, after being part of Russian Empire for a century or more. Most of them did not exist as a separate state previously, especially in the assigned borders. Some briefly existed, often as anarchist or German puppet states, between 1917 and 1921.

USSR did indeed gain control of various Eastern European countries such as Poland or Romania, but they were not part of USSR so they did not have to fight in Afghanistan.

The rest of stuff about nations and statehood opportunity is frankly bullshit. These ASSRs were also carved by USSR out of Russia, and almost universally have 40% to 80% of Russian population within them - the only separatist opportunity they have is to be a particularly poor reissue of Bosnia. People are not stupid and they understand that.

I can see who you are. This comment is sufficient. Is this enough context for you?

In both cases, Vietnam or Afghanistan, US won, until it lost its sight and pulled out, leaving everything on the shoulders of a demoralized and ill-equipped local governance. Now this was unfair fight because this replacement was not willing nor capable to project any actual force and they crumbled fast. This is what I was talking about. Afghanistan government resistance failed because they were terrified about the perspective of them losing in the fight and then receiving the wrath of Taliban. This perspective looked real enough for them after Taliban had broken the agreements and no US retaliation followed. Finally all of it spiraled into humiliating cowardly escape of the remaining US forces. US lost because their top of the command was irresolute coward who didn't understand the consequences of his policy, short term nor long term. One bombing raid against Taliban positions may have changed everything. Now we got war in Ukraine and greatly worsening situation in Middle East and Africa because the enemy understood very quickly what the US leader really is and took their changes. We are lucky that Taiwan was not lost and this is only thanks to the bravery of Ukrainians, but all of this is again on the edge because of the insurmountable stubbornness and stupidity of US politicians.

The US lost in Vietnam, in fact the Paris treaty came as close to unconditional surrender as it gets without using the term.

Same in Afghanistan, NATO lost hard after being slowly kicked out of the country.

In both cases, none of the US or NATO strategic goals were achieved, while almost all of the opposing sides were. If you think the US won in Vietnam, Iraq won the Gulf War (number two, in the 90s).

The parent is claiming "the US won until they lost", which I guess doesn't contradict your post lol.

Yeah, same way Germany won two world wars. Until around the half way mark, then they lost. Or a soccer team wins a match by being ahead 2 - 0 at half time and then losing 2-3.

Nazi Germany won clear victories against Poland and France.

Had UK given up and signed a peace with Germany then it could have been possible that there wouldn't have been what we call WW2 today at all. Given what Germans planned to do then fortunately it didn't happen. We can thank stubbornness of Churchill for this. But Germany made it even worse - it declared war on United States.

But there were no treaties between Germany and Allies until Germany had unconditionally surrendered.

But my claim was a little different. I wrote that US didn't lose until it "lost its sight". I would argue that it was not understood what is US actually doing in Afghanistan and when you don't have any idea what you are doing then you can't win anything.

The Wehrmacht was stopped before Moscow by the Soviets before lend-lease supplies had any meaningful impact. And the Soviet would not have ended the war when the UK exited it. Which never was an option to begin with, a seperate peace with the western allies was one Hitler's many pipe dreams.

The victory against Poland was, in the end, meaningless with the failure of Barbarossa. As was the victory against France in the West, as soon as the war in Borth Africa was lost by the axis. There never was a path to Axis victory, and winning the first to rounds by points is meabingless if you get knocked out by round 6. Should be self-explanatory.

In hindsight yes, most of this is true, but it is not guaranteed that all of this would have happened.

Wehrmacht rapid advance was stopped, but it didn't yet mean pushing them out would have been possible without tremendous material support through lend lease, without what there wouldn't have been any adequate Red Army logistics and armor.

USSR was able to produce around 40 000 tanks and this force overwhelmed German armor capacity, but they were able build this much only considering that US provided 400 000 trucks, if it was not so, considerable amount of tank building capacity would have to had been shared to build trucks, but even then the steel to build tanks came from US. On top of this USSR got 14 000 planes and also rail wagons and engines.

If there was a pipe dream then it was Red Army countering Wehrmacht without US material support. Russians like to minuscule the importance of US support but it was substantial and most likely essential for their victory.

> The same problems of logistics also do apply to the local opposition.

Do they? There's a reason they call it asymmetric warfare.

An occupying army of 200,000 needs 200,000 guns.

An insurgent force that wants to shoot up one bus/shop/school/whatever per day only needs one gun a day.

The US were extremely willing to cut North Vietnamese supply lines, including illegal operations in neighbouring countries. The only thing not tried was flattening cities in the North by air (that approach didn't work in WW2 neither, so no big loss). True so, the South received billions in support from the US, including a full troop deployment for years. The North did the same from China and the USSR. Still, at the core, it was as much a conventional as it was an unconventional war. One the US lost. The Vietnamese did deploy a ton of cutting edge weapons so, from top notch fighter jets to air-to-air missiles.

And no, you do not win those kind of wars by brutality. People love to believe that, it just doesn't work that way.

I would disagree. The most US was willing to do was to cause some inconvenience. If US really wanted to stop Viet Cong infiltration then they should have built a proper demilitarized zone between Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos.

I think you're right in so far that the US never really wanted to do what it would take to convert the whole of Afghanistan to a friendly state, like say Japan after WWII.

Urbanization statistics for Afghanistan place them at something like 20-25% with most of the population being rural. So even if you occupy the cities and stay for a generation (19.9 year according to https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/field/mothers-mean-ag...), you haven't really won the war. The first source I found says that in 2017 about 50% of the population was still under Taliban control or where Taliban openly moved about.

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