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Comment by wavemode | Hacker News Reader

Well, regardless of technology, the space of things you can accomplish without risking your own troops' lives is very small. (Unless you're willing to go nuclear, which has the pesky downside of ending the world.)

To put it in perspective - in Vietnam, opposition forces lost over a million troops and continued to fight viciously. The US lost around 50,000 and gave up and left.

Democratic countries simply lack the stomach for this kind of thing (which is a good thing, really).

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As opposed to democratic countries like the US or UK which would just lay down their arms after a few tens of thousands of their soldiers were killed in the event of a foreign military invasion on their territory?

I'm not talking about a foreign invasion on us, I'm talking about invading the foreigners (in this case, Iran).

That’s obvious but you seemed to be putting down foreigners for being able to stomach a million or more of them dying to protect their country from invasion unlike the enlightened democratic countries who couldn’t tolerate so many of their own dying for any reason. I think if tens or hundreds of thousands of soldiers from, say China, attacked the US, Americans would be very willing to fight to the last man to prevent becoming a vassal state of the CCP.

Perhaps the disconnect exists because some Americans have become too used to thinking from the perspective of invaders that they cannot possibly think from the perspective of the invaded?

You're reading something into my comment which isn't there. Hard to say what it is, but it's causing me to not really understand what you're talking about, at this point.

Maybe you thought I was disparaging Vietnam for defending their land? But in your own comment you indicate that you know I'm not talking about defense, that I'm talking about not having the stomach for loss of life as the invading force. So, IDK

I think being the "home team" makes swallowing those casualties easier (as easy as they can be, anyways); it's easy to perceive the situation as a fight for your life.

Obviously, there were other things going on in Vietnam (and Afghanistan and the larger War on Terror) to keep them fighting but it's much easier to muster up the manpower when a war seems existential because it's happening in your neighborhood.

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