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Originally Posted by Raellus
I hope that I didn't offend with my comment re Iraq.
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Oh, God, no, not at all. I was just highlighting the small unit-scale disparity. We saw much the same (but to a lesser degree, edging somewhat towards more parity) in Vietnam, and the Russians saw similar in Afghanistan in the 80s.
It was more engaging with the concept that we "lost to dirt farmers," a common refrain (not ascribed to you, or your words, but you get my meaning as shorthand). Dirt farmers don't win stand-up fights, because they very often literally can't. It's a much easier proposition, however, for that invading country to collectively get tired of spending money and trickling a few thousand lives over the course of ten or twenty years and decide to go home. This isn't to say it's not a victory for the occupied nation, because it absolutely is, but it's a victory derived from a wholly different mechanism than a battlefield defeat due to a lack of training, or faulty organization or doctrine, or hardware that simply cannot match the enemy's capability, or - I would contend - from underestimating the enemy tactically, operationally or even strategically, because there are such wildly different dynamics at play than in the conventional conflicts we organize militaries to engage. There's no way to put a bullet through an idea, or to drop a bomb and change hundreds or thousands of years of cultural gestalt, and this simple concept seems lost on in the minds of every leader who's ever had the thought to send soldiers to fight a population that can hide among civilians for the simple reason that they - for the most part - ARE civilians.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Raellus
I totally get what you're saying, and I understand very well how guerilla forces can win a strategic victory against a much stronger nation that's doing its best to follow the civilized laws of war. War becomes a lot more difficult when you're fighting with one hand tied behind your back against an enemy that refuses to follow any rules. What surprises and offends me is how US policy-makers haven't internalized and applied the lessons the country so painfully learned in Vietnam.
As for underestimating a near-peer adversary, the USA has made that mistake before. Even after its shocked-the-world victory over Russia in 1905, Japan's military capabilities and competence were sneered at by the USA and its western allies, much to their detriment in 1941-'42. Just a few years later, Douglas McArthur underestimated the Chinese* prior to their entry into the Korean Conflict and the result was a stalemate along the 38th parallel.
*To consider the PLA a near-peer adversary in 1951 is being very generous.
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I feel like it might be valid to point out that the era you're talking about, the beginning of the Cold War, as the world was creeping out of WWII and then sat and watched as the Korean War played out, is also where we began getting serious about R&D with the goal of overmatch, in a crawl progressing to a sprint culminating in the late 70s and early 80s where WP/Eastern hardware was definitively outclassed across more or less the full spectrum of systems.
I can't deny at all your points on the Russo-Japanese conflict, or the Chinese entry in Korea, but that's somewhat outside of the scope of the modern jet, nuclear, missile, and information ages of warfare, where we're looking at a case where a civilian company in one nation can cover an invaded country with satellites and provide non-jammable coverage against the efforts of what was supposedly the second army on the planet, and where sending last-generation hardware from one side can drag a three-day special military operation into a three-year slaughter without any feet, wheels, track, or tread on the ground.