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Comment by rdl | Hacker News Reader

IIRC there have been wars where we used "tactical maneuver" but still thought of strategic attrition as the goal -- Vietnam is probably the best example, where the "body count" was the end goal, and "take this hill" was primarily for the purpose of incidentally killing (at a very favorable exchange ratio) the enemy. Karl Marlantes has a pretty good criticism of this in "What it is like to go to war" -- the escalating levels of lying over statistics, as well as the ultimate futility and irrelevance of the body count statistic. Unclear to me if this was due to a lack of possible focal points to attack, or because those focal points were somehow out of bounds (Chinese supply lines, etc.).

Also IIRC the Vietnam war is not considered to have been one of America's finest military successes, either.

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Indeed, one of its finest defeats. Vietnam was extremely complicated, both on the battlefield and off, and it's not my area of expertise; that being said, a lot of modern maneuvers planted their seeds in that soil.

Americans grew tired of Iraq when insurgents kept picking off a soldier every other day and there was little to show for their loss. Similar themes presented in the latter years of Vietnam, combined with a complicated political picture stateside. That's the success of an insurgency: attrition not of materiel, but the minds, resolve, and fortitude of a belligerent. That was certainly evident in Vietnam, as well, and it's a great parallel.

I've always been curious if the "problem" from the popular-support perspective was the casualties (which, while high, were not THAT high for the total force -- in Iraq, most were due to IEDs/rockets and spread over a large number; in Afghanistan they're a bit more concentrated on actual combat troops), or the lack of progress, or some combination.

There really was ~zero progress (net; there were some wins and some losses) from late-2003 to early-2007 in Iraq, overall, and from ~2003 to ~2009 in Afghanistan (the 2009 end date is questionable; I'm reluctant to say Afghanistan overall is better right now than it was right after the CIA/ODA 555 operations in late 2001, as described in First In by Gary Schroen).

I was in Iraq watching this and was a lot more critical of the way the US was fighting from 2003-2006 than of the actual casualty numbers.

It's certainly more rational to be more willing to take a few hundred casualties if it brings a quick victory than to endure long slow bleeding of thousands, but I don't know if popular opinion is rational. I think casualties-per-second are much higher in offensive operations than in purely static defense, though.

Matterhorn was a great book. I'll have to check out the other.

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