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Comment by lossolo | Hacker News Reader

The US has lost all wars in the last five decades: Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq. War is merely a tool to achieve political goals, and none of these goals were achieved. This means all the effort and resources spent on these wars were wasted, and the wars were effectively lost. The US has never faced an opponent like China. Nazi Germany is a joke compared to China when you consider their access to resources, production capacity and technology. There is a lot of mythology surrounding the idea that the US won WWII alone, but without the Soviet Union's effort, they would likely have lost that war as well. Now, you have Russia and China in the same corner. People should read the Pentagon report[1][2] from a few days ago, which states that China is already almost on par with the US military in most categories.

1. https://media.defense.gov/2024/Dec/18/2003615520/-1/-1/0/MIL...

2. https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/12/18/...

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Is it fair to say the US easily won the "hot" stages of each of these wars, but struggled and failed with the counter-insurgency bits? And possibly the same is happening in Yemen.

These are totally different tasks, and I'm not sure you can deduce much about one from the performance in the other.

The US's main strategy is to dominate the battlefield and achieve the objective as fast as possible using technology and overwhelming firepower. So yes, they could and did win the "hot" stages where they were able to deploy all they have.

But when the fight dragged out, as it has always done and absolutely will be in a peer or near peer conflict, the effectiveness of the US military drops like a rock. It is here that I question what is the point of all the expensive toys and the trillion dollars budget.

True, but also as these wars have dragged out, they have turned to counter-insurgency. Are you saying the US would also do badly at a dragged out "conventional" conflict?

Yes, very likely. The US has no means to rapidly switch into wartime production. It is woefully inadequate when you realize that there is only one factory making tanks and it almost got shutdown. Even Russia is out producing the US. China would absolutely embarrass the US if it comes to sustained conflict and supply chain.

And the US military is still stuck in the past in term of strategy for all out conflicts. A bunch of drones scared the entire nation the last few days and the army literally has no effective means to immediately response or track them. Meanwhile, billions are poured into aircraft carriers, all of which are easy targets for mass drone strikes or an ICBM attack. The US has no way to recover even a single carrier loss. There is simply no time or material to build them faster. Yet they are still the backbone of the US force. A bone that is getting more and more vulnerable every day.

I'm not sure how you can deduce this.

All these previous wars were definitely not cases like this. There was no shortage of kit or firepower. It was rather that the US didn't know how to fight a counter-insurgency. That is a strategic failure, but seems to tell you nothing about matching up to Russia or China.

Industrial production, hmm, maybe. I guess its hard for anyone to compare to China, and I really hope we never live to find out. But Russia is no great comparison point. US is certainly out producing Russia in terms of aircraft and lots of ammunition types, so much so that the small part that makes it to Ukraine is just-about a match for what Russia produces and imports in a wartime economy, with nothing diverted to reserves.

And why do you conclude the US couldn't ramp it up? It hasn't tried for many decades, I guess since Vietnam. My impression, if anything, is the opposite. It has plenty of spare capital which could be put to that use, should the political will arise.

As for broader US strategy and carriers being easy targets for ICBMs or drones, I would think this is speculation at this point. Until there is a hot war, it's so hard to know. And with 11 carrier groups, the US can afford to lose a lot of them and still have substantially more than the next opponent. Russia lost many ships to Ukraine drones, but in incomparable scenarios, such as a lone cruiser with its air defences unmanned, pretty close to the coast. I think that's hard to compare to how a carrier group might fare hundreds of miles offshore.

There were definitely a lack of funding justification as the previous wars dragged on. Iraq and Afghanistan cost trillions of dollar each, against tiny forces. The US could hang on for as long as it did simply because of the massive budget discrepancy to their enemies. But eventually had to withdraw/surrender when it was obvious they couldn't win.

Where did this massive budget go to? There is one tank factory, 7 major shipyards, and about 250 aircrafts made per year. Except aircraft, China military production dwarfs the US in everything else.

Even Russia is producing more ammunition than the US can. Just to be clear, Ukraine is receiving aid from the entire Western hemisphere, not just the US. At the start of Ukraine conflict, the US made 28K artillery shells per month, and is really struggling to ramp up to 50K in the next few years. Meanwhile, Russia is making over 200K. Just that alone should raise alarms about how pathetic the US manufacturing base has become compared to its adversaries.

Call it my opinion but when an army become overreliant on high tech but with precious few numbers that they can't replace easily, against a new paradigm in war where disposable mass strikes, i.e. drones, is becoming dominant, it is clear who is losing. Japan lost exactly this way in the Pacific to the US.

The US military is now optimized for cost and profit, like everything else here. Lawyers and businessmen are taking charge, not engineers and scientists. Worse, they are considered a cost to be cut.

> But eventually had to withdraw/surrender when it was obvious they couldn't win.

In fairness, the US trained the Afghan military, and then pulled out.

The Afghan army folded like a cheap suit, showing the US so objective to stand up a national army failed.

The same people who lied about how tough the Russians were, lied about WMDs, lied about how well the ANA was going to withstand the Taliban, lost the last 5 decades of wars while spending more than anyone else on Earth, have a report that demands we increase spending on their stuff.

Along the way we became a country where it was legal to torture people, have secret courts, and 2/3 of Americans outwardly state they don’t trust the judicial system (so, basically Russia/China/authoritarian shit hole levels of “trust”).

What if they’re just full of shit?

The same people who lied about how tough the Russians were, lied about how well the ANA was going to withstand the Taliban,

There's a difference between "lying" about things, and being simply deluded or deeply misunderstanding them.

Of course they lied about WMD. But they didn't "lie" about those other two situations. Whether you like it or not, there's a major distinction at play here.

lost the last 5 decades of wars

It's true that they lost the 3 major wars (Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan). But they didn't lose all of their pet wars in this time period. The Gulf War (I betcha forgot that one!) was a very, very major conflict that they won unambiguously.

So already, you're completely out to lunch, right there. But there were numerous second-order conflicts that they won also during this time period. This most significant was the proxy war against the USSR in Afghanistan (effectively the "First Afghan War" from the US perspective) which was unambiguously won, also. Which BTW had some pretty huge consequences (though it seems you've forgotten about those, as well).

And several second-order conflicts in addition (Panama, Yugoslavia, Kosovo) that were effectively won also, even if others (Syria, Libya) were not.

I know, I know - like Reagan said, "facts are boring things". What's my point, you ask? Let's get right to it.

What if they’re just full of shit?

Of course they're full of shit.

But what's vastly more important point is -- if you can't be even ballpark correct about the stuff above -- or (as seems to be more likely the case) you plainly don't care -- then what does that make you full of?

If it's all just word salad to you -- if the basic factual accuracy of stuff like this just doesn't really matter to you; as long as you can smoosh the various bullet points together somehow, and sculpt them in your into whatever broad, sweeping, hypermoralistic narrative that your worldview seems to hinge on -- then not only are you no different, really, from "them" and all of their big, fat stinking lies.

Effectively, you're on the same team.

Sorry, meant 5 decades of losses, not 5 wars. You’re right we won one! And screwed up that area so badly we got ISIS.

You wrote a big long post to say I lied as bad as the warmongers and liars, and totally left out my other points. Essentially built an entire argument on a keyboard slip and called me a liar on the same magnitude to distract - without mentioning anything about the legalized torture, secret laws, and secret courts!

Cool trick, but it probably won’t work here - we’ve read the manual about subverting and redirecting online discourse.

It wasn't a trick, and I'm not subverting or redirecting anything.

Meanwhile, yours wasn't merely a keyboard slip. The point, simply, is that your encapsulation of the last 5 decades was very myopic. Don't mean to condescend, but it does seem that in terms of basic global history you're still playing catch-up, as it were.

The concern (as I attempted to articulate) wasn't so much that you were "lying", but that (going by your statements) you do seem to have a rather blasé attitude about the truth, and/or to have simply missed out on a lot of the major event chronology of the last 50 years. Which suggests that you're much more interested in your moral narratives than in what actually happened, or why.

The irony here is that we probably agree about 70 percent in terms of which side is "bad" and who is to "blame". It's just that that other 30 percent is, unfortunately, complex and intermixed.

If it helps, I hereby mention "legalized torture, secret laws, and secret courts".

In turn, if you like, you can "mention" the ethnic cleansings in Srebrenica, Prijedor, Foča, Zvornik, Doboj Bosanski Šamac and Bijeljina -- and what, precisely, you think the morally compromised Western powers should have done about this general state of affairs at the time.

That is, if these events ping your awareness at all.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_cleansing_in_the_Bosnia...

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