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| Home Front: Politix |
| Three Wars, No Victory – Why? |
| 2021-02-26 |
| [National Review] America is the most powerful country in the history of the world, yet it has not won any of the three major wars it has fought over the past half century. This has not been due to a lack of effort and persistence. Our troops fought in Vietnam for nine years and in Iraq for a dozen. We’re still fighting after 20 years in Afghanistan, where our generals are asking the Taliban to stop attacking. That’s not a sign of success; the victor does not make such requests. The fact is that in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, America has failed in its mission to develop and sustain democracies. What accounts for this trifecta of failure? Through luck and poor shooting by our enemies, in all three wars I was able to witness both the actual fighting on the ground and the creation of the high-level policies that shaped the wars. In this article, I lay out what I believe were the root causes of the failures. Oscar Wilde once remarked, "Two kinds of people are fascinating: people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing." I’m rendering one man’s opinion, while hoping to fall into neither category. Broadly speaking, leadership in war comes from three hubs. The first consists of the military commanders who design strategy and decide how our troops will fight. The second hub is the policy-makers, including the president as commander in chief and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs as his military adviser, plus the theater commander, the CIA, the State Department, and the secretary of defense, who all give input. The third hub is the culture and popular mood of our country, as reflected by congressional votes and the slant of the mainstream press. The press does not report "just the facts"; rather, it presents a point of view by selecting which facts to focus upon. The popular mood is the ultimate fulcrum of political power, because the policy hub can’t fight a war without resources from Congress. I divided the wars into major phases, and for each phase I assigned a percentage of responsibility for failure to each of those three hubs, as shown below. A rating of 0 percent indicates that I do not believe that particular hub contributed to the failure in that phase of the war. A rating of + means that hub contributed to success, not failure. Note that while the locus for failed decision-making shifted from war to war, overall the heaviest responsibility lay with the policy hub in Washington, including the commander in chief. |
| Posted by:Besoeker |
| #13 "Never fight a land war in Asia." |
| Posted by: Chusoper Ulutle1630 2021-02-26 18:39 |
| #12 He forgot the fourth hub - the lawyers. They run the ROE and the final decisions on Spec Ops past the damn lawyers. |
| Posted by: KBK 2021-02-26 18:02 |
| #11 Any honest review of Vietnam has to take the homefront into consideration. Fear of the draft caused a large number of baby boomers to embrace Communism. That had far larger long term implications for the world than the war itself. |
| Posted by: rjschwarz 2021-02-26 16:31 |
| #10 9/11 was a mean and humiliating attack on the West with lasting mean and humiliating consequences for citizens of Western nations. We have established a domestic regime of a creeping police state combined with an increasingly relevant sharia as a consequence of Western military engagements. We've not even tried to gently lead the locals to modernity. We've (not so gently) imported and normalized the mores of alien tyranny into and within Western societies. The 'Free World' has had zero civilizational confidence for decades. Anything resembling non-defeat for the West has been declared politically toxic. Hence defeat is the only possible outcome. |
| Posted by: Elmerert Hupens2660 2021-02-26 15:20 |
| #9 Adding to (Tom) #7 & #8: --We convinced the "Old Gray Men" in the Politburo that we were so "batshit crazy" in wasting our children to defend Vietnam that we would go even further if the attacked in the North German Plains. It became a gamble that they didn't feel like taking. |
| Posted by: magpie 2021-02-26 14:29 |
| #8 (Forgot:) And in stopping the spread of Communism in Southeast Asia, which succeeded at the Thai border. |
| Posted by: Tom 2021-02-26 13:56 |
| #7 An honest history of Vietnam will have to wait until the last of us Baby Boomers is dead. We did fight with one hand tied behind our back; but think that we wanted to save South Viet Nam (in which we failed) without igniting WWIII (in which we succeeded) and without bringing China and/or Russia into the war (as we had failed to do in Korea just 10 years earlier, and in which we succeeded.) |
| Posted by: Tom 2021-02-26 13:55 |
| #6 A lot of our efforts have been towards rebuilding failed states and trying to remake them as Democracies. That's sort of the opposite of what the military's historic role. If we'd done the McArthur White Shogun thing out of the gate instead of aiming for Democracy they might actually be peaceful Democracies by now. |
| Posted by: rjschwarz 2021-02-26 13:50 |
| #5 Winning decisively is mean and humiliating for the loser. Better to be admired in the diplomatic halls of Europe and the EU for gently leading the locals to modernity. Yes, my thinking has evolved over the years. |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2021-02-26 13:20 |
| #4 They don't want to win. The point is to keep the war going. It's profitable. Yes, they really are this evil. |
| Posted by: Elmung Hatrack5948 2021-02-26 12:24 |
| #3 Further proof of the old saying about not being able to see the forest because of all the trees. He makes on fatal assumption in that we would win a war in those three countries. In Viet-Nam our nation was not prepared to fight to win, so we fought for nothing. In Iraq we won the war, just could not maintain the peace after. And in Afghanistan We decimated AQ, but we had no idea how to unify a tribal nation. It was like the same guy that designed the strategy for Viet-Nam designed the strategic plan for Afghanistan. The author is looking too deep into it. Our leaders in the beltway are not willing to suffer the bad press over fighting to win. So we don't fight to win. Its all that simple, not complicated, or out of reach. In a more simple of term, todays political class would have surrendered to the Japanese and Germans, its just where we are at in time... |
| Posted by: 49 Pan 2021-02-26 12:13 |
| #2 Because of the "leaders" favored by National Review. |
| Posted by: Rob Crawford 2021-02-26 10:50 |
| #1 We have this mythology of a great nation lead by great leaders. That's close, but not right. We are a great nation despite being led by mediocre to bad leaders. They are good at politics and little else. At best. And ideologue hacks in general. There is little our troops can do if their orders are to lose. Or do stupid things that make losing inevitable. |
| Posted by: Angstrom 2021-02-26 10:34 |