Top American military commanders wish for conventional war

[Alkaloid]

Alkaloid - some of your comments are just painful to read. Do you understand that 'MRAP' is just a heading under which about a dozen different vehicle designs have been thrown, some of which did in fact exist before the US Marines and then Army asked for them? The RG-31 for example is just as South African Mamba with the Mercades diesel replaced by an American diesel. The Cougar already existed, Buffalo was a prewar new design, and several of the others are existing truck chassis simply given armor. The reason so many different ones exist is because no one supplier was capable of producing the required number remotely quickly enough. That's why the single most common one by far is the International MaxxPro, coming from a commercial truck maker who was geared up to build lots of things quickly, and actually had little previous involvement in defense contracts. The Army never really wanted the things either because of the excessive size, Congress pretty much told them they had to be bought and low and behold the IED threat kept going up so it proved a wise idea. The Marines were more enthusiastic but also had less armor to start with.

I think you may have misunderstood me a little here. I don't disagree with the need to provide an IED resistant vehicle, or even the need for quick production of them. And actually checking out the MaxxPro it in itself is a lot less objectionable way to do things, it's really just a quick and dirty modification to an already produce truck chassis. What I disagree with is spending money on developing a new system when there are already systems that perform adequately in the role currently in production. 9 times out of 10 it is going to be easier and cheaper to expand production than develop and build an entirely new product, which is especially important when it is for something like an MRAP, which is a band aid that mitigates the effects of an insurgency, not the cure to the sucking chest wound the is the US failure to 'win hearts and minds.'

It's a much easier political sell, however, to announce that you are providing a fancier, newer bandage to a problem than to announce you are actually trying to close up the sucking chest wound sometimes though, and defence contractors are very good at lobbying, and I imagine will continue to be so.

If you think fighting COIN was done poorly... think about how bad it would be if you had to do it will all the infantry already killed and wounded. Talking about wasting money on MRAPs years into the war, as having been better spent on 'more translators from the get go... you know I don't disagree on needing more translators but that's a complete reality disconnect on the funding. You can't send money back in time like that.

It is a bit, yeah. A better example would be the rush to expand the military by dropping recruitment standards. The better option would have been to raise them and recruit less, but attempt to attract more educated recruits, especially in areas like languages, in anticipation of this turning into a COIN operation. Hindsight 20/20 and all that is suppose, I don't know haw clear it was to anyone what the Afghan war would turn into, but it should have been fairly obvious, I imagine.

...Of course there are weapons to win trench warfare.

They're called tanks. They've been around for about ninety-six years this September. You might have noticed them here and there. Then there are other things, such as radios. Radios help a lot. Seriously, the complete inability of trench line defenses to cope with technological weapons of the mid-20th century was one of the big surprises of the Second World War. If trench warfare really were a recipe for perfect stalemate under all conditions, France would have come out as one of the big tough heroes of World War Two, and the 1991 Gulf War would have been a horrible failure for the US.

Yes, but who doesn't have tanks and radios these days? They won WW1 because only the Allied powers really had them and used them properly. If both sides are evenly matched and have them (assuming asymmetry is pretty pointless here because then too many other factors come into play) then you can mass your tanks and win individual battles, but then can mass theirs to counter you, or just attack somewhere else so your gains don't really matter all that much. Individual weapons systems are only war winning in themselves when they revolutionise the way you fight and your enemy cannot match or counter them. Otherwise they go from being the way to win a war to being the way to fight a war.

[Simon_Jester]

You seriously think we can't build weapons to win trench warfare? Everything else in the thread aside, that's just hilariously pig-ignorant. We can, do, and have; that's why trench warfare hasn't been a viable method of fighting a war for the past ninety years or so.

The weapons of the military-industrial complex of the time were unable to break the stalemate of the trenches in WWI, you stupid fuck. They were only broken by innovations developed outside the aegis of the military-industrial complex- the tank of France and Britain, the stormtrooper units of Germany, and the presence of fresh American troops. Only the tank is a material development, and the tank was proposed by a French army captain, not by an arms manufacturer. WWI was not won by the evolutionary development of new weapons, but by revolutions in thought developed from direct battlefield experience, or more specifically psychological factors.

You know how contracting works? Someone decides what they needs, then offers to pay for it, then pays someone for it. If people don't know what they need, the contracting process usually won't give them what they need.

In 1913, no one had any idea what they needed to fight industrialized war. They thought they did: lots of rifles and a little field artillery, a repetition of the theme that had won all past wars since the 17th century. They were wrong. So they ordered the wrong things. They didn't see the need- as you say, there was a revolution in thought required and no one had gotten around to it.

This never changed. The industrial side of the military-industrial complex are manufacturers, Bakustra, they make stuff. They are not responsible, do not claim responsibility, and are not assigned responsibility for figuring out which things to build. This actually helps them parasitize off the state budget, because responsibility for making the shopping list and deciding the prices is separated. The weapon makers will happily sell the state things the state doesn't need, and can simply raise their hands and shrug if that means the war isn't won.

Meanwhile, the military side of the complex has never been able to figure out in advance what weapons will win a war. Because war is horrendously complicated and has people on the other side actively screwing with whatever solution you create to the problem. About all they ever manage is to predict what they'll need to not lose, to hold on. Manufacturing an enormous number of bullets may not win a World War One style trench conflict, but if you don't have the bullets you're going to lose the war by default. So a lot of bullets get ordered, and the manufacturers laugh all the way to the bank, even if having a huge pile of bullets doesn't guarantee victory.

Ergo, stalemate. And if they're accused of being complicit in this, or of being failures because of this, the military-industrial complex can usually laugh off the accusation that it's their fault. Because asking them to get something this difficult right before the war even starts really is asking the impossible. Even nations where there's no capitalist military-industrial complex at all don't seem to be able to cope with this.

Jesus fuck, your shtick of "everybody is just misunderstanding each other" is really tiresome when you don't bother to read my posts. Again, the military-industrial complex in the US runs on both fear and assurances of invincibility. These interact- the fear provides people with a need for security which the weapons of war fulfill. But these weapons run on the idea of military invincibility. Actually using them runs the risk of losing this aura of conferred invincibility, and indeed, in every shooting war beyond the most one-sided (Panama, Grenada) during the Cold War, the products of the military-industrial complex have failed to live up to their promises.

And yet this seldom actually bothers the advocates of the system, nor does it cause any major, permanent reverse in the complex's fortunes.

Granted, General Dynamics and Boeing weren't able to come up with a magic trillion-dollar button that would make all the nasty brown guerillaterrorists go away when you push it. But this fact doesn't seem to have stopped them from doing all right through several years of the Bush administration and into the Obama administration. About the only thing that's even threatened to dent DoD's budget (and military-industrial complex revenue) is the recession, which had nothing to do with popular outrage against the failure of armored cars and experimental IED-jammers to win the war in Iraq.

Likewise, Vietnam didn't make much long term difference to the DoD budget, except in that the costs of paying for the war itself- for shipping troops across the world, and making supplies for them while in intense combat- went away. Development of fighter jets, nuclear weapons, heavy tanks, and so on went almost totally unaffected through the 1970s and into the Reagan boom.

Honestly, the more you explain this, the more it sounds like you're making predictions that don't come true.

So that's why guerrilla warfare is markedly inferior- the two parts, fear and security through dependence, must work together, and when put to the test, the second part always fails to live up, and the longer the test continues, the more this becomes apparent, which is why you had the massive protests after Vietnam rather than Korea.

Korea was three years long, including two years of positional warfare from 1951-53. It wasn't quite as intense as typical World War Two combat operations, but since WWII arguably set the benchmark for "worst battles ever," that really isn't saying very much.

Is three years too little time for the flaws in the military-industrial complex to show up and inspire protests? Or are you oversimplifying the facts? I could see it either way.

The proto-complex of the pre-Cold War world relied first on the idea of a "mission of civilization" in the Philippines, later on "securing American economic interests" in South America, and then finally settled on the highest-minded "making the world safe for democracy" in WWI, which is where the fear component was introduced and put to immediate use. So yes, it is entirely relevant, as even though it was not yet fully developed, there were the same components- grandiose claims about the power of modern weapons that failed utterly, a long, bloody struggle, and so on, that we can see in Vietnam and Iraq.

In World War One, the war ended within about six months of the time the first large US combat units took the field on the Western Front, without any conspicuous failure of the US's weapons. Is that your idea of a long, bloody struggle? I thought Korea was "short."

You're trying to use the trench deadlock of 1914-17, which the US didn't even participate in, as evidence for the nature of the American military-industrial complex here. It would make sense if you were trying to make a point about British or French history too, but you haven't even mentioned them. Perhaps that was an oversight?

So in a sense, conventional wars fail too. This is why the military-industrial complex is parasitic as well as being a vile and inhumane industry- because it only runs well when its products are not being used.

I would argue that the military-industrial complex is quite capable of running well when its products are being used, as long as the use is not vital. When things are desperate, you get a total mobilization, which means war is too important to be left up to the profiteers. And you'll be paying the price for years afterward. For instance, the British "military-industrial complex," such as it was, never recovered from World War Two because the scale of their effort exhausted the nation, not because British military equipment failed to perform as advertised.

[Sea Skimmer]

What I disagree with is spending money on developing a new system when there are already systems that perform adequately in the role currently in production. 9 times out of 10 it is going to be easier and cheaper to expand production than develop and build an entirely new product, which is especially important when it is for something like an MRAP, which is a band aid that mitigates the effects of an insurgency, not the cure to the sucking chest wound the is the US failure to 'win hearts and minds.'

Production was expanded when it was possible; but remember expanding existing production in this context could mean an entire new factory at which point you might as well build what you want. Armored hummve production, was originally massively expanded by the new factory method, and the vehicles simply proved inadequate. So in fact taking the easy method just threw away a lot of money and lives.

It's a much easier political sell, however, to announce that you are providing a fancier, newer bandage to a problem than to announce you are actually trying to close up the sucking chest wound sometimes though, and defence contractors are very good at lobbying, and I imagine will continue to be so.

Contractors were also how the US military got its translators quickly. They’ll try to meet any demand you have. It’s not like every single defense contract is a ten billion dollar company that only makes jet fighters, nor that the big ones won’t sell small and specialist products. Lobbying is a far greater concern in peacetime then wartime.

It is a bit, yeah. A better example would be the rush to expand the military by dropping recruitment standards. The better option would have been to raise them and recruit less, but attempt to attract more educated recruits, especially in areas like languages, in anticipation of this turning into a COIN operation.

That completely does not work, at all. Not even remotely. COIN demands as many warm bodies as possible. The entire war in Iraq and Afghanistan has been one giant demonstration of the fact that technology and training cannot replace numbers. If you could do anything in hindsight, throwing 400,000 conscripts into Iraq would have worked brilliantly. Since we could not do that, we had to have a long slog to training local troops while the insurgency thrived and in the interim field as many as possible of our own men. This is now being attempted in Afghanistan, but with the much lower local standards of education and development (everyone is completely literate, major problem) it is a much slower grind and its by no means clear NATO is going to stay long enough to make it work.

Yes, but who doesn't have tanks and radios these days? They won WW1 because only the Allied powers really had them and used them properly.

Really the allies won because they simply had more manpower, and far more ammunition. Radios didn’t do much; an entire 1918 British tank brigade for example had only one or two radio tanks.

If both sides are evenly matched and have them (assuming asymmetry is pretty pointless here because then too many other factors come into play) then you can mass your tanks and win individual battles, but then can mass theirs to counter you, or just attack somewhere else so your gains don't really matter all that much. Individual weapons systems are only war winning in themselves when they revolutionise the way you fight and your enemy cannot match or counter them. Otherwise they go from being the way to win a war to being the way to fight a war.

This is very true. Tanks being the best anti tank weapon can turn into both sides’ tanks simply annihilating each other without a serious change in the front lines. However combinations of weapons systems can be war winning without revolutionary changes. If everything you have is simply better then what the enemy has and you both fight the same way its kind of obvious who should win.

[Bakustra]

You seriously think we can't build weapons to win trench warfare? Everything else in the thread aside, that's just hilariously pig-ignorant. We can, do, and have; that's why trench warfare hasn't been a viable method of fighting a war for the past ninety years or so.

The weapons of the military-industrial complex of the time were unable to break the stalemate of the trenches in WWI, you stupid fuck. They were only broken by innovations developed outside the aegis of the military-industrial complex- the tank of France and Britain, the stormtrooper units of Germany, and the presence of fresh American troops. Only the tank is a material development, and the tank was proposed by a French army captain, not by an arms manufacturer. WWI was not won by the evolutionary development of new weapons, but by revolutions in thought developed from direct battlefield experience, or more specifically psychological factors.

None of which means you can't build weapons to win trench warfare, because we can, do, and have. The huge messy stalemate that was World War I had more to do with commanders failing to adapt to the weapons at their disposal than the war inevitably being a stalemate in and of itself. Ordering a massed infantry charge into machine gun fire is a product of not understanding that new technology has made old tactics obsolete, not the failure of new technology.

As for the tank, Captain Levavasseur submitted his design for armored, self-propelled field artillery in 1903, it's true. I fail to see how this disqualifies the tank as a weapon that can neutralize trench warfare, or how a captain in the army is not part of the military-industrial complex.

You're a fucking idiot. The point is that the ability to fight effectively against entrenched defenses wasn't a product of arms manufacturers developing more refined machineguns and artillery, but by a revolution in thought- using small breakthrough units (tanks, stormtroopers) to breach the trenches and open the way for mass assaults to follow. This revolution had nothing to do with the military industries, but with the experiences of field commanders (meanwhile, Levavasseur, who was a line officer, was well below the status where people generally enter the leadership of the complex- military-industrial means military industries like think-tanks and arms manufacturers, not "the intersection between military and industry", unless you seriously think Eisenhower was concerned about uniform manufacturers). They developed these entirely apart from the arms manufacturers, the earliest part of the complex.

This was a revolution in thought- the material was merely a way to put the idea into reality. War is majority psychological. If material differences were as important as they are made out to be, the US would have walked all over Okinawa, Iwo Jima, and Guadalcanal, since they had better gear and equipment than the IJA and IJN soldiers. The US would also have thrashed the PLA in Korea, won Vietnam with both hands tied behind its back, and currently be readying to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the liberation of Iraq in a year and change's time. These things didn't happen because psychology is more important than material in war, which is the broader point I am making and which your petty mind cannot grasp. If you really want to "win", then explain how the US could have lost Vietnam if physical material is so important. (Note: fascist mythologies like the "stab-in-the-back" don't count.)

[Simon_Jester]

You're a fucking idiot. The point is that the ability to fight effectively against entrenched defenses wasn't a product of arms manufacturers developing more refined machineguns and artillery, but by a revolution in thought- using small breakthrough units (tanks, stormtroopers) to breach the trenches and open the way for mass assaults to follow. This revolution had nothing to do with the military industries, but with the experiences of field commanders (meanwhile, Levavasseur, who was a line officer, was well below the status where people generally enter the leadership of the complex- military-industrial means military industries like think-tanks and arms manufacturers, not "the intersection between military and industry", unless you seriously think Eisenhower was concerned about uniform manufacturers). They developed these entirely apart from the arms manufacturers, the earliest part of the complex.

In Britain the tank owed much of its genesis to high-level backing from the Admiralty; in France the project to actually build tanks was headed by a colonel. The fact that a captain put some sketches on paper in 1903, or even managed to throw together a mock-up that wasn't followed up on, proves nothing- you'd do as well to argue that the tank was "invented" by H.G. Wells.

Please stop cherry-picking factoids to make yourself look credible to people who don't bother to check your references.

This was a revolution in thought- the material was merely a way to put the idea into reality. War is majority psychological. If material differences were as important as they are made out to be, the US would have walked all over Okinawa, Iwo Jima, and Guadalcanal, since they had better gear and equipment than the IJA and IJN soldiers.

They did. Read some history books.

Look at who owned the islands when the smoke cleared, and the casualty ratios. On Guadalcanal the Japanese did 90% of the dying. On Iwo Jima, the Japanese managed to improve their death ratio and only did 75% of the dying. On Okinawa, the Japanese only did about 40-45% of the dying, mostly because the Okinawan civilians did the other half, at the hands of both sides.

Look, I understand that you don't know these things, or care about them. That's all right. But please don't pretend to know or care about them for the sake of making a rhetorical point. It makes you look sophomoric.

The US would also have thrashed the PLA in Korea, won Vietnam with both hands tied behind its back, and currently be readying to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the liberation of Iraq in a year and change's time. These things didn't happen because psychology is more important than material in war, which is the broader point I am making and which your petty mind cannot grasp. If you really want to "win", then explain how the US could have lost Vietnam if physical material is so important. (Note: fascist mythologies like the "stab-in-the-back" don't count.)

Before I address this: do you wish to make this a general theory of warfare, one which is always true? Or do you wish this rule to apply only to the special cases where you want it to be true, to avoid having to deal with inconvenient counterexamples?

[Alkaloid]

Production was expanded when it was possible; but remember expanding existing production in this context could mean an entire new factory at which point you might as well build what you want. Armored hummve production, was originally massively expanded by the new factory method, and the vehicles simply proved inadequate. So in fact taking the easy method just threw away a lot of money and lives.

Yeah, and the MaxxPro I am OK with looking at how it's built. It is really just a civilian truck chassis with an armoured V hull bolted to it, which is OK providing you are willing to accept the flaws it has (and it has a few) in order to get them quickly. I was under the impression that it was designed as an IED resistant vehicle from the ground up, and that I would take issue with because if you do that you would be far better off getting the save company to make Cougars or similar under licence. Why anyone thought up armoured hummers were a good idea I will never know.

Contractors were also how the US military got its translators quickly. They’ll try to meet any demand you have. It’s not like every single defense contract is a ten billion dollar company that only makes jet fighters, nor that the big ones won’t sell small and specialist products. Lobbying is a far greater concern in peacetime then wartime.

That completely does not work, at all. Not even remotely. COIN demands as many warm bodies as possible. The entire war in Iraq and Afghanistan has been one giant demonstration of the fact that technology and training cannot replace numbers. If you could do anything in hindsight, throwing 400,000 conscripts into Iraq would have worked brilliantly. Since we could not do that, we had to have a long slog to training local troops while the insurgency thrived and in the interim field as many as possible of our own men. This is now being attempted in Afghanistan, but with the much lower local standards of education and development (everyone is completely literate, major problem) it is a much slower grind and its by no means clear NATO is going to stay long enough to make it work.

These are kind of related, but I very much doubt throwing any number of panicky conscripts who really don't want to be there into Iraq or Afghanistan would have made the insurgency any less likely to be successful. The US won the conventional war in Iraq, and lost the guerrilla war. It is loosing in Afghanistan and is preparing to retreat, however they want to couch it, fundamentally because they were never able to convince the civilian population to help them fight it. You cannot win that sort of fight without at least the tacit support of the locals, preferably active, unless you want to start literally decimating the nearest village to where an attack occurs if they don't warn you about it an pulling similar shit.

Honestly I think the biggest mistake was trying to install a government and create the ANA and ANP. The better way to go about things would be to try and train a small police force for a village, town or suburb made up of local residents to the same standard, that way they would actually be able to work with their local leaders to solve other problems as well, not just the Taliban, and then integrate them into provincial scale and national level police forces once you get the degree of competence in the surrounding area to do so, actually try and exploit the tribal nature of the country instead of working against it.. But to pull that off you would need to spread your forces thinner and have more translators, ideally at squad or platoon level, and the army would have a much easier time of it if they had translators who were members of the army, recruited for that purpose, than if they were civilian contractors.

Really the allies won because they simply had more manpower, and far more ammunition. Radios didn’t do much; an entire 1918 British tank brigade for example had only one or two radio tanks.

If everything you have is simply better then what the enemy has and you both fight the same way its kind of obvious who should win.

Yeah, like I said if both sides are not more or less equal too many other variables come into play to really say any one thing is war winning in and of itself. That said, the proper use of tanks and communications, (I was including telephone and telegraph cables laid by advancing troops as radios, not really correct, I know) really starting at Amiens, was when the Allied powers went from just grinding the Central powers down to actually winning the war, starting to make gains without the absurd losses they had needed to take previously. Admittedly, the Germans were pretty close to finished prior to that, but had they had the same equipment earlier in the war and used it with a similar degree of competence it is unlikely that it would have been unsuccessful.

[Panzersharkcat]

This was a revolution in thought- the material was merely a way to put the idea into reality. War is majority psychological. If material differences were as important as they are made out to be, the US would have walked all over Okinawa, Iwo Jima, and Guadalcanal, since they had better gear and equipment than the IJA and IJN soldiers.

They did. Read some history books.

Look at who owned the islands when the smoke cleared, and the casualty ratios. On Guadalcanal the Japanese did 90% of the dying. On Iwo Jima, the Japanese managed to improve their death ratio and only did 75% of the dying. On Okinawa, the Japanese only did about 40-45% of the dying, mostly because the Okinawan civilians did the other half, at the hands of both sides.

And pretty much the entire history of Western colonialism. Remember this phrase?
"Whatever happens, we have got
The Maxim gun, and they have not."

[Sea Skimmer]

[
Yeah, and the MaxxPro I am OK with looking at how it's built. It is really just a civilian truck chassis with an armoured V hull bolted to it, which is OK providing you are willing to accept the flaws it has (and it has a few) in order to get them quickly. I was under the impression that it was designed as an IED resistant vehicle from the ground up, and that I would take issue with because if you do that you would be far better off getting the save company to make Cougars or similar under licence. Why anyone thought up armoured hummers were a good idea I will never know.

The MaxxPro being too heavy and too tall is common to all the MRAPs. The latest ones are being built lighter and lower under the M-ATV program but this is openly accepting less protection; mainly because roads are worse in Afghanistan and bombs less common.

These are kind of related, but I very much doubt throwing any number of panicky conscripts who really don't want to be there into Iraq or Afghanistan would have made the insurgency any less likely to be successful.

Yeah, it would, because the insurgents would be completely unable to wage the IED war they did, security for minorities would be vastly better and just generally the insurgents would be forced into much more difficult and more risky tactics to accomplish anything. You should really look int othe different in security in say, Saigon in the 1960s, and Baghdad in the mid 2000s. Both suffered many attacks, but the scale of the threat was just completely different and in large part this was because of the shear number of US and ARVN troops in Saigon. It certainly was not because the VC had fewer weapons or less training, they were vastly superior on both fronts.

The US won the conventional war in Iraq, and lost the guerrilla war.

It blatantly did not, have you been hiding in a hole for the last couple years? The utter insanity of the insurgent terrorist campaign and the US surge turned into most of the insurgents joining the government after figuring out they were all being killed by the surge. The place is still violent sure, but nothing like what it was five or six years ago.

It is loosing in Afghanistan and is preparing to retreat, however they want to couch it, fundamentally because they were never able to convince the civilian population to help them fight it.

Really, so that’s why the US just signed a deal to keep training the Afghan army until 2024?

You cannot win that sort of fight without at least the tacit support of the locals, preferably active, unless you want to start literally decimating the nearest village to where an attack occurs if they don't warn you about it an pulling similar shit.

Of course you need local support, that’s the point, and you win support most easily by providing a credible presence to protect the population until they can defend themselves. That takes raw numbers. You concept of a fewer highly trained men does not work. No matter how good they are, they cannot cover the territory. You end up ceding a huge area of the country to the enemy out of hand, and that was the problem in Afghanistan from the start. The 45,000 or so troops the US had around just couldn't be effective because they had too few numbers, and espically they had very few rotary wing assets to provide mobility for the numbers they did have.

Honestly I think the biggest mistake was trying to install a government and create the ANA and ANP. The better way to go about things would be to try and train a small police force for a village, town or suburb made up of local residents to the same standard, that way they would actually be able to work with their local leaders to solve other problems as well, not just the Taliban, and then integrate them into provincial scale and national level police forces once you get the degree of competence in the surrounding area to do so, actually try and exploit the tribal nature of the country instead of working against it.

You know, Afghanistan actually wasn’t so nuts about its tribes until after the Soviets rolled in and deliberately played the tribes up against each other. The entire point now is to undo that damage that has been compounded for decades. Trying to do this with no national government at all is fucking stupid. It means foreign forces are 100% an occupying colonial force. The Afghans would never stand for it, especially when major forces existed in 2001 which joined with the US out of hand and went on to found and support the new government.

But to pull that off you would need to spread your forces thinner and have more translators, ideally at squad or platoon level, and the army would have a much easier time of it if they had translators who were members of the army, recruited for that purpose, than if they were civilian contractors.

So you want to spread forces thinner, and reduce the numbers at the same time. Do you realize how dumb this is? We get most of our translators BTW from the local population, especially in Afghanistan when a considerable number of local dialects exist your never going to get US born translators for. Do you propose we now have those Afghans in the US Army?

Admittedly, the Germans were pretty close to finished prior to that, but had they had the same equipment earlier in the war and used it with a similar degree of competence it is unlikely that it would have been unsuccessful.

You could say the same thing about sending the 1918 Germans back in time to the mid war or early war period. 1914 both sides were underarmed and under trained. The war would have been much different had both sides simply had more of the weapons they had already designed, except hand grenades which really only existed on the German side, in 1914 and the tactics to match them. Its troublesome to draw too many lessons about technology in war from WW1 because of stuff like this.

[Grumman]

Of course you need local support, that’s the point, and you win support most easily by providing a credible presence to protect the population until they can defend themselves. That takes raw numbers. You concept of a fewer highly trained men does not work.

That doesn't automatically mean your alternative will work. As you say, you need local support, but that also means you need to not do things that will make you lose local support, which isn't going to be a high priority for someone who resents you for forcing them to go fight for some third world shithole. So yes, you need numbers, but you also need to trust them not to do things that will make your job harder like shooting civilians, burning Korans and desecrating corpses.

[Alkaloid]

The MaxxPro being too heavy and too tall is common to all the MRAPs. The latest ones are being built lighter and lower under the M-ATV program but this is openly accepting less protection; mainly because roads are worse in Afghanistan and bombs less common.

The top heaviness is supposedly more pronounced in the MaxxPro, and looking at it I can sort of see why, it is comparatively more a box on wheels than the purpose built models. Supposedly there are issues with the suspension as well, which I assume is a result of the chassis carrying too much weight in a way it wasn't really designed to. It's an OK design, and the problems aren't crippling, but it could be better, just probably not better and as easy to make lots of.

Yeah, it would, because the insurgents would be completely unable to wage the IED war they did, security for minorities would be vastly better and just generally the insurgents would be forced into much more difficult and more risky tactics to accomplish anything. You should really look int othe different in security in say, Saigon in the 1960s, and Baghdad in the mid 2000s. Both suffered many attacks, but the scale of the threat was just completely different and in large part this was because of the shear number of US and ARVN troops in Saigon. It certainly was not because the VC had fewer weapons or less training, they were vastly superior on both fronts.

It blatantly did not, have you been hiding in a hole for the last couple years? The utter insanity of the insurgent terrorist campaign and the US surge turned into most of the insurgents joining the government after figuring out they were all being killed by the surge. The place is still violent sure, but nothing like what it was five or six years ago.

There being less attacks because you have hundreds of thousands of troops in the area is only winning the war if you are willing to station those troops there permanently to maintain that level of security. The US wasn't willing to in Vietnam, wasn't willing to in Iraq and isn't willing to in Afghanistan. All the insurgents have to do is attack occasionally, enough to let the populace know that they are still around and will be around after the occupying troops go home. They don't have to drive the occupying forces from the country to win, they just have to not lose until they leave so they win by default. It's all well and good to say the insurgents all went into government in Iraq, but that just means the people the US were fighting now run Iraq. With what is regarded as the most corrupt government in the middle east. How the people the US was fighting running the country they were fighting for control of is a US victory is beyond me.

Of course you need local support, that’s the point, and you win support most easily by providing a credible presence to protect the population until they can defend themselves. That takes raw numbers. You concept of a fewer highly trained men does not work. No matter how good they are, they cannot cover the territory. You end up ceding a huge area of the country to the enemy out of hand, and that was the problem in Afghanistan from the start. The 45,000 or so troops the US had around just couldn't be effective because they had too few numbers, and espically they had very few rotary wing assets to provide mobility for the numbers they did have.

You know, Afghanistan actually wasn’t so nuts about its tribes until after the Soviets rolled in and deliberately played the tribes up against each other. The entire point now is to undo that damage that has been compounded for decades. Trying to do this with no national government at all is fucking stupid. It means foreign forces are 100% an occupying colonial force. The Afghans would never stand for it, especially when major forces existed in 2001 which joined with the US out of hand and went on to found and support the new government.

If you are not willing to permanently station the numbers of troops required to retain control in a country then your only solution is to train the countries citizens to do that themselves. The coalition tried to do that by grabbing Afghans and getting them to join the ANA or the ANP, despite the fact that many of them have tribal enemies and have no personal interest in protecting other ethnicities or tribes. It's all well and good to say it's the Soviets fault they caused the tribal splits, but the fact is those splits exist and need to be dealt with, and shoving people who have serious tribal rivalries into the same organisation and expecting it to work is stupid. Nation building in this context isn't just about setting up infrastructure, it's about trying to build a sense of a nation amongst people who don't really have one because their nation was destroyed, they only have their local communities. So, train people to protect their local communities, something they have a stake in. Train them to the same standard so that in a few months, you can approach them with the fact that these people they've been fighting, well they are fighting the village in the next valley too, and would you like to work with this village to fight them, because it will be heaps easier. Nations don't normally form because some guy was declared in charge and killed anyone who disagreed, they tended to form because it was mutually beneficial to work together, and artificially creating and fostering that is the quickest way to actually form a nation that will work. 45,000 well trained people might not be able to do that, but neither will 400,000 guys dragged off the street and told to go to war.

Really, so that’s why the US just signed a deal to keep training the Afghan army until 2024?

Honestly? I suspect if Karzai is still alive six months after the US officially pull out it will because the US 'training' forces in the country are mostly in the capital keeping him alive while the rest of the country goes to shit.

Its troublesome to draw too many lessons about technology in war from WW1 because of stuff like this.

True. It's just telling that the tank being used like that was a game changer simply because the Germans simply could not counter it, unlike the aeroplane despite its arguably greater long term influence on the way wars are fought.

[Sea Skimmer]

That doesn't automatically mean your alternative will work. As you say, you need local support, but that also means you need to not do things that will make you lose local support, which isn't going to be a high priority for someone who resents you for forcing them to go fight for some third world shithole. So yes, you need numbers, but you also need to trust them not to do things that will make your job harder like shooting civilians, burning Korans and desecrating corpses.

That stuff will happen with any troops you field. It’s a bit delusional to think you can avoid it with quality in a war; they are still human. Its just the tough truth and you can bet it happened a dozen times for every time you heard about it, if not far more so.

The best way to avoid stuff like that is avoid what creates animosity between two groups of humans in the first place, which is the fighting and alien nature of the whole thing. Throwing a huge amount of manpower into the fight in a largely static role is an excellent way to suppress fighting, and make that which does occur decisive and short lived. A mans urge to desecrate enemy dead is bound to be lower when nobody in his unit has been blown up by a bomb in eight months ect... and he’s been watching the same people in the streets that whole time. It didn't work in Vietnam because the US presidency did all it could to ensure that the supply of enemy was not only unlimited, it was actively increasing the whole time and troops bounced around all over the place fighting them. Other factors were also involved such as the insurgency having been deeply rooted and externally directed for the previous 20 years that aren’t a factor in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Anyway, the biggest problem with the swarm o troops is its very expensive. The US has not treated Iraq and Afghanistan like they were serious wars. In fact the costs have been low enough that as a percentage of our economy we a number of points at which we spent more on purely peacetime operations. War supplemental spending isn’t even equal to half the regular defense budget. Worse, the most effective weapon in Afghanistan, reconstruction and development aid, has been penny pinched to a completely absurd degree. More then one US command has said the difference between a government supporter and the Taliban is paved roads; anywhere paved roads are extended the economy expands, gets the locals out of dirt poor poverty and they suddenly loose the desire to risk themselves for money helping the Taliban and can break out of debt bondage they pay off growing drugs. The reality is if anyone took the war seriously, every almost idea mentioned here could be implemented simultaneously. The only thing you would not want to do is actually reduce total numbers, this is just idiocy.

[Sea Skimmer]

The top heaviness is supposedly more pronounced in the MaxxPro, and looking at it I can sort of see why, it is comparatively more a box on wheels than the purpose built models. Supposedly there are issues with the suspension as well, which I assume is a result of the chassis carrying too much weight in a way it wasn't really designed to. It's an OK design, and the problems aren't crippling, but it could be better, just probably not better and as easy to make lots of.

Part of the issue is a lot of MRAPs were given big heavy slabs of composite armor to stop EFPs after they were designed. The only MRAP actually designed with that kind of armor from the onset was the Israeli Golan, which proved deficient against bombs and was quickly abandon.

There being less attacks because you have hundreds of thousands of troops in the area is only winning the war if you are willing to station those troops there permanently to maintain that level of security. The US wasn't willing to in Vietnam,

Actually in Vietnam we built up what one of the largest armies on the world before we left, and it was entirely capable of securing the capital against serious insurgent attacks and largely wiped out the VC. It was only broken when the North, heavily aided by the USSR and China, turned the war into a fully conventional one. Even then with US air support the 1972 offensive was turned back, while the 1975 offensive had something modest like 2,000 tanks in it.

wasn't willing to in Iraq

The US stayed long enough to build up a large local military force that fields thousands of tanks and armored vehicles. Yes, horrible failure.

and isn't willing to in Afghanistan. All the insurgents have to do is attack occasionally, enough to let the populace know that they are still around and will be around after the occupying troops go home.

The insurgents automatically win by attacking occasionally, how dumb are you trying to get? By this logic the IRA is victorious because the British Army has ceased patrolling Northern Ireland but someone still gets shot from time to time.

They don't have to drive the occupying forces from the country to win, they just have to not lose until they leave so they win by default.

That would be true if the insurgents were purely concerned with driving out an occupying force, and the goal of the occupying force was to stay forever. It was not in Iraq and it is not in Afghanistan. The point of invading Iraq was to change the regime, this was accomplished and the place has not falling into utter chaos. The insurgency sought to overthrow the new regime and replace it with... well most groups wanted some kind of theocracy, many had no real goals, but either way they did not overthrow that regime. They joined it at a low level and the US took extremely low losses the last two full years of the war.

It's all well and good to say the insurgents all went into government in Iraq, but that just means the people the US were fighting now run Iraq. With what is regarded as the most corrupt government in the middle east. How the people the US was fighting running the country they were fighting for control of is a US victory is beyond me.

Its easy, you are a very ignorant person at best, very stupid at worst. The same people who were running Iraq before the US left run it now. Its blatant that you have no idea what has or is going on in Iraq.

If you are not willing to permanently station the numbers of troops required to retain control in a country then your only solution is to train the countries citizens to do that themselves. The coalition tried to do that by grabbing Afghans and getting them to join the ANA or the ANP, despite the fact that many of them have tribal enemies and have no personal interest in protecting other ethnicities or tribes. It's all well and good to say it's the Soviets fault they caused the tribal splits, but the fact is those splits exist and need to be dealt with, and shoving people who have serious tribal rivalries into the same organisation and expecting it to work is stupid.

Its working slowly. In any event, if you think that is stupid, your idea of keeping them separate but equal with no national control at all, and nobody but the US occupying force to guide them is comprehensively retarded. It would fail from day one.

Nation building in this context isn't just about setting up infrastructure, it's about trying to build a sense of a nation amongst people who don't really have one because their nation was destroyed, they only have their local communities. So, train people to protect their local communities, something they have a stake in. Train them to the same standard so that in a few months, you can approach them with the fact that these people they've been fighting, well they are fighting the village in the next valley too, and would you like to work with this village to fight them, because it will be heaps easier. Nations don't normally form because some guy was declared in charge and killed anyone who disagreed, they tended to form because it was mutually beneficial to work together, and artificially creating and fostering that is the quickest way to actually form a nation that will work. 45,000 well trained people might not be able to do that, but neither will 400,000 guys dragged off the street and told to go to war.

Actually nations do tend to be formed because someone in charge killed everyone who opposed him. That's what your retarded regional approach would be. Everyone has a sense of local power trained into them, reinforcing the existing divisions and providing the basis to tribal warfare forever or until one tribe can finally crush all the others. Meanwhile the occupying US forces would not even have the slightest bit of legitimacy and the vital support of several tens of thousands of NATO troops would have never happened. What Afghanistan needs as much or more then military success is economic development, and without a national government that's impossible.

Honestly? I suspect if Karzai is still alive six months after the US officially pull out it will because the US 'training' forces in the country are mostly in the capital keeping him alive while the rest of the country goes to shit.

That may happen, but it won't be because the US sent too many troops in the first place.

[Alkaloid]

Part of the issue is a lot of MRAPs were given big heavy slabs of composite armor to stop EFPs after they were designed. The only MRAP actually designed with that kind of armor from the onset was the Israeli Golan, which proved deficient against bombs and was quickly abandon.

I would have thought they need to down lower on the hull and should actually lower the centre of gravity. Regardless, the MaxxPro would still suffer more from that just because it has its weight riding higher to start with. I'm not really sure what we are arguing about any more though as we seem to largely agree on this.

Actually in Vietnam we built up what one of the largest armies on the world before we left, and it was entirely capable of securing the capital against serious insurgent attacks and largely wiped out the VC. It was only broken when the North, heavily aided by the USSR and China, turned the war into a fully conventional one. Even then with US air support the 1972 offensive was turned back, while the 1975 offensive had something modest like 2,000 tanks in it.

Come on, amn, the South Vietnamese collapsed without US support. They were not capable of securing the capital on their own, you can tell because they didn't. They may have had the numbers and equipment to make it feasible, but they lacked the knowledge or will to actually do it, while the North didn't. That was the problem, the US could never get enough of the Vietnamese people to want to take risks to help them identify the VC units because the VC and the North always seemed the greater threat long term. Eventually the US would leave and the VC would still be there, the same as the Taliban in Afghanistan.

The US stayed long enough to build up a large local military force that fields thousands of tanks and armored vehicles. Yes, horrible failure.

I though the goal was to make a bastion of democracy to help spread goodwill toward the US in the middle east, not sell a bunch of tanks. If you want to call it a success, go ahead, but by the stated goals going in, removing Saddam and spreading freedom and democracy, well they removed Saddam so it wasn't a complete bust, but there isn't freedom or democracy there.

The insurgents automatically win by attacking occasionally, how dumb are you trying to get? By this logic the IRA is victorious because the British Army has ceased patrolling Northern Ireland but someone still gets shot from time to time.

No, because there is no reasonable expectation the IRA will overthrow the Irish government and take control of the country with a series of vicious reprisals on anyone who aided the Brits. The fact is your average Afghan remembers the Taliban running the country, and rather sensibly doesn't want to take the risk of aiding the US against them when the US won't be there in two years time but the Taliban still will, and are probably going to remember what he did.

That would be true if the insurgents were purely concerned with driving out an occupying force, and the goal of the occupying force was to stay forever. It was not in Iraq and it is not in Afghanistan. The point of invading Iraq was to change the regime, this was accomplished and the place has not falling into utter chaos. The insurgency sought to overthrow the new regime and replace it with... well most groups wanted some kind of theocracy, many had no real goals, but either way they did not overthrow that regime. They joined it at a low level and the US took extremely low losses the last two full years of the war.

Its easy, you are a very ignorant person at best, very stupid at worst. The same people who were running Iraq before the US left run it now. Its blatant that you have no idea what has or is going on in Iraq.

I think I covered these points when I said that the US did not achieve its stated goals. Dangerous and violent individuals in one of the most corrupt governments on the plant does not speak to me of the successful establishment of democracy, if you disagree I doubt I can change your mind.

Its working slowly. In any event, if you think that is stupid, your idea of keeping them separate but equal with no national control at all, and nobody but the US occupying force to guide them is comprehensively retarded. It would fail from day one.

Not no national control. The US should take over the business of the day to day administration of Afghanistan while working to rebuild the idea among Afghans that they have a nation. It's hard enough to get people in the US to pay tax, why would it be easier to explain to an Afghan farmer that you are taking a portion of his wages to build a road on the other side of the country and this is somehow a benefit to him. You need to re establish the idea that there is a benefit to him by having him actually take steps to improve his local area, which he can see, then the surrounding areas because there are people from those areas helping him improve his village at the same time, and finally improving Afghanistan as a whole because he actually trusts someone he has never met to represent his interests on the world stage.

Actually nations do tend to be formed because someone in charge killed everyone who opposed him. That's what your retarded regional approach would be. Everyone has a sense of local power trained into them, reinforcing the existing divisions and providing the basis to tribal warfare forever or until one tribe can finally crush all the others. Meanwhile the occupying US forces would not even have the slightest bit of legitimacy and the vital support of several tens of thousands of NATO troops would have never happened. What Afghanistan needs as much or more then military success is economic development, and without a national government that's impossible.

Yes, that's the kicker. You can't get national government by taking a guy, saying he's in charge and then he just is. They will rightly see him as a puppet who will collapse the instant the US leave. If Karzai had taken office by sweeping in, kicking the pants out of everyone that opposed him and delivering thunderous speeches to cheering supporters before starting on a massive road building project its possible that the country could get behind him because he impresses them, but he didn't, he took power through a rather dull process imposed by people they don't really trust, and democracy only really works when voters trust the system.

That may happen, but it won't be because the US sent too many troops in the first place.

No, but it won't be because they didn't have enough either.

[Sea Skimmer]

I would have thought they need to down lower on the hull and should actually lower the centre of gravity. Regardless, the MaxxPro would still suffer more from that just because it has its weight riding higher to start with. I'm not really sure what we are arguing about any more though as we seem to largely agree on this.

Lowering the hull means less blast protection; they didn’t design these things high because it was impossible to go lower. Not really arguing much at this point now that you’ve actually figured out you had no clue what you were talking about initially.

Come on, amn, the South Vietnamese collapsed without US support. They were not capable of securing the capital on their own, you can tell because they didn't.

They did against an insurgency. Saigon fell to a massive conventional invasion funded and massively supported by the Soviet Union and China. Even then the north took massive losses to do so. Such an offensive could not have happened from the North’s own resources unless you think North Vietnam was producing tanks in the early 70s. Do you fucking have any clue about this war?

They may have had the numbers and equipment to make it feasible, but they lacked the knowledge or will to actually do it, while the North didn't.

Right, so that’s why the North had its troops actually being trained in the Soviet Union right? Why it had as many as 100,000 Chinese troops on its territory until the first bombing halt? Because they were so superior and self reliant? Give me a fucking break.

That was the problem, the US could never get enough of the Vietnamese people to want to take risks to help them identify the VC units because the VC and the North always seemed the greater threat long term. Eventually the US would leave and the VC would still be there, the same as the Taliban in Afghanistan.

The VC that were left by 1973 were a shadow of what they had been, and a virtual non factor by 1975. The war turned entirely conventional precisely because the VC were not effective and never going to win.

I though the goal was to make a bastion of democracy to help spread goodwill toward the US in the middle east, not sell a bunch of tanks. If you want to call it a success, go ahead, but by the stated goals going in, removing Saddam and spreading freedom and democracy, well they removed Saddam so it wasn't a complete bust, but there isn't freedom or democracy there.

Trying to change the subject much? First you claim the US plain lost, then it’s well the US lost because insurgents joined the government rather than being killed to the last man, both bullshit, now it’s the US hasn’t accomplished optimal democracy so it lost. It’s so clever how you try to argue something different the moment anything factual comes into play.

No, because there is no reasonable expectation the IRA will overthrow the Irish government and take control of the country with a series of vicious reprisals on anyone who aided the Brits. The fact is your average Afghan remembers the Taliban running the country, and rather sensibly doesn't want to take the risk of aiding the US against them when the US won't be there in two years time but the Taliban still will, and are probably going to remember what he did.

And the US just signed a deal to stay on ten more years, something you were obviously ignorant of. The Afghan police and Army have steadily grown in strength and are intended to keep growing so that the removal of major NATO forces will not led to reduction in security forces overall. In fact Afghan forces could be bigger, but at an early point a decision was made not to try to enlarge them faster than supporting assets and officers could be trained. Many insurgencies linger a long time, the fact that they often accomplish little is frequently related to the ability to persist. They take as few risks as possible because they die if they do.

I think I covered these points when I said that the US did not achieve its stated goals.
Dangerous and violent individuals in one of the most corrupt governments on the plant does not speak to me of the successful establishment of democracy, if you disagree I doubt I can change your mind.

You were trying to claim the US was openly military defeated. This is utter bullshit.

Not no national control. The US should take over the business of the day to day administration of Afghanistan while working to rebuild the idea among Afghans that they have a nation.

And this would completely fail because they wouldn’t have a nation, they would be colonial subjects. This is the dumbest idea ever. Now if you wanted to proposal something rational, like a lot more civilian US advisors at all levels of government, with lots of extra aid to pad the way, that would make some real sense.

It's hard enough to get people in the US to pay tax, why would it be easier to explain to an Afghan farmer that you are taking a portion of his wages to build a road on the other side of the country and this is somehow a benefit to him.

That might be a little more relevant if not for the fact that Afghan farmers are not taxed on wages. The Afghans tax corporations and funny enough, they tax traffic on the roads at checkpoints. So people who benefit from said roads pay the tax, very straightforward and more effective then it might be because so few paved roads enter the country. The real source of money in the country is going to be all the huge mineral deposits which have been discovered. Exploiting those would be much easier if larger numbers of security forces existed.

You need to re establish the idea that there is a benefit to him by having him actually take steps to improve his local area, which he can see, then the surrounding areas because there are people from those areas helping him improve his village at the same time, and finally improving Afghanistan as a whole because he actually trusts someone he has never met to represent his interests on the world stage.

You can do that through a national government; without the retarded colonial approach you want.

Yes, that's the kicker. You can't get national government by taking a guy, saying he's in charge and then he just is. They will rightly see him as a puppet who will collapse the instant the US leave. If Karzai had taken office by sweeping in, kicking the pants out of everyone that opposed him and delivering thunderous speeches to cheering supporters before starting on a massive road building project its possible that the country could get behind him because he impresses them, but he didn't, he took power through a rather dull process imposed by people they don't really trust, and democracy only really works when voters trust the system.

It is downright comical that you think a national leader who was involved in the struggle against the Taliban is going to be seen as a worse puppet then random people being denied any authority and completely controlled by a US colonial administration.

No, but it won't be because they didn't have enough either.

You have no clue what you are talking about. Your own dumb proposal would actually demand much greater US forces because it completely gives up any and all strategic mobility of local troops. Meaning zero ability to shift troops away from the quiet sectors into sectors with serious fighting. Plus of course, NATO would never even dream of touching such a plan so all those forces have to be replaced by US just to keep things even.

[Alkaloid]

Lowering the hull means less blast protection; they didn’t design these things high because it was impossible to go lower. Not really arguing much at this point now that you’ve actually figured out you had no clue what you were talking about initially.

It also reduces the risk of roll over in an explosion as well, which has also killed people. Again, trade offs. The point I was making though was the composite armour place I would have thought would be lower because I don't see why EFP's would be hitting the top of the vehicle. I would have thought the important areas for them to be would be on the belly and lower half of the hull, which should in theory move the centre of gravity down.

They did against an insurgency. Saigon fell to a massive conventional invasion funded and massively supported by the Soviet Union and China. Even then the north took massive losses to do so. Such an offensive could not have happened from the North’s own resources unless you think North Vietnam was producing tanks in the early 70s. Do you fucking have any clue about this war?

Yes. I'm aware. After the US pulled out and the South Vietnamese army had essentially collapsed. And the actual fall of Saigon might be relevant if the Taliban were preparing a massive conventional assault on Kabul. The relevant part to this discussion is the insurgency and guerrilla war that proved very difficult to stop and was a large part of the reason there was so much domestic pressure to pull US troops out. The US was also much freer with the methods it could use back then to try and wipe out the VC and North Vietnamese guerrillas, what with the wide scale use of chemical weapons reprisal attacks cluster bombs and landmines that they would be crucified for using today.

Right, so that’s why the North had its troops actually being trained in the Soviet Union right? Why it had as many as 100,000 Chinese troops on its territory until the first bombing halt? Because they were so superior and self reliant? Give me a fucking break.

I didn't say the North was untrained. The US did not have to pull out when it did for any military reason. It pulled out because of domestic political pressure was hurting the government, and the South collapsed without their support. Neither the US or South Vietnam wanted to win the war enough to keep fighting it. This doesn't mean the North would have won without the support of the USSR or China, but the USSR and China both offered enough support for the North to win.

The VC that were left by 1973 were a shadow of what they had been, and a virtual non factor by 1975. The war turned entirely conventional precisely because the VC were not effective and never going to win.

The VC themselves would not overthrow against an established government, no, no more than the IRA would overthrow Dublin. The comparison that needs to be made is how difficult the VC were to actually find and fight directly, much like the Taliban, even thought he VC were far more likely to use more conventional tactics that the Taliban are.

Trying to change the subject much? First you claim the US plain lost, then it’s well the US lost because insurgents joined the government rather than being killed to the last man, both bullshit, now it’s the US hasn’t accomplished optimal democracy so it lost. It’s so clever how you try to argue something different the moment anything factual comes into play.

They won almost every battle they fought. They failed to achieve the stated objectives they had going into the war. They pulled out because domestic political pressure made the war in Iraq untenable for them. Had there not been an insurgency after the initial invasion and victory over the Iraqi armed forces that political pressure would not have existed. The insurgents, by your own admission, are now installed in the Iraqi government, mostly at low levels. The Iraqi government has been assessed as being the most corrupt government in the middle east. That's not a democracy, not even an optimal democracy, any more than Syria is a democracy. Now, if you want to claim that setting up a democracy was never really the goal, I'm willing to accept that as a premise, but what has happened in Iraq is not what the US stated they wanted to happen.

And the US just signed a deal to stay on ten more years, something you were obviously ignorant of. The Afghan police and Army have steadily grown in strength and are intended to keep growing so that the removal of major NATO forces will not led to reduction in security forces overall. In fact Afghan forces could be bigger, but at an early point a decision was made not to try to enlarge them faster than supporting assets and officers could be trained. Many insurgencies linger a long time, the fact that they often accomplish little is frequently related to the ability to persist. They take as few risks as possible because they die if they do.

Sorry, everything I read says that the US plans to have its troops pulled out by 2014, and most (non political) analysis I read of the situation is that that is too soon,and the ANA and ANP will not be ready to take on the brunt of the work by then, and that the Karzai government will not retain control in part because the Taliban is still strong enough to create chaos and then seize power from that. It's all well and good to say that there are the same level of securioty forces, but there are still problems getting members of the ANA or ANP to even turn up to operations on time, let alone effectively plan them or carry them out.

And this would completely fail because they wouldn’t have a nation, they would be colonial subjects. This is the dumbest idea ever. Now if you wanted to proposal something rational, like a lot more civilian US advisors at all levels of government, with lots of extra aid to pad the way, that would make some real sense.

Of course its fucking colonialism, you have already invaded a country for the purpose of tearing down its government and installing one of your choosing, it doesn't get much more colonial than that. You can put in a Afghan bloke you call president if you want, but if you are going to take that position away from him as soon as he goes against you he is a puppet, and people looking on are well within their rights to call bullshit. If you plan to set up a national government, fine, but just grabbing a bunch of people who were already there and are largely inept or corrupt and calling it a government has clearly not gone all that well, why not just cut the bullshit? People might not like it, but what they like least about the current government is that it is openly corrupt and they get no benefit from it that they can see. You need to establish trust in the governmental system by introducing it in steps, from town council through local area through province to state, not just lumping a bunch of crooks on them and telling them to pick one.

It is downright comical that you think a national leader who was involved in the struggle against the Taliban is going to be seen as a worse puppet then random people being denied any authority and completely controlled by a US colonial administration.

A puppet is a puppet. It doesn't matter if it's Ghengis Kahn or Ghandi, if they can't make their own decisions in running a government then one is really as bad as the other to the people being told what they are getting is an election. Random people are already being denied authority when you roll in and dismantle the government anyway

You have no clue what you are talking about. Your own dumb proposal would actually demand much greater US forces because it completely gives up any and all strategic mobility of local troops. Meaning zero ability to shift troops away from the quiet sectors into sectors with serious fighting. Plus of course, NATO would never even dream of touching such a plan so all those forces have to be replaced by US just to keep things even.

Dragging people from all over the country into areas they have no stake in defending is part of the problem. There are huge swathes of country that members of the ANA and ANP just do no give a shit about because of tribal rivalries or apathy. This isn't the US where someone from LA is going to be equally upset if Boston or Orlando are bombed. You need to get them to work on things they care about first, then worry about wider problems. You can actually start to funnel more of your own troops into problem areas then because the troops you leave behind are going to be far more motivated to defend their areas of responsibility, their house and their neighbours veggie patch.

[Sea Skimmer]

It also reduces the risk of roll over in an explosion as well, which has also killed people. Again, trade offs. The point I was making though was the composite armour place I would have thought would be lower because I don't see why EFP's would be hitting the top of the vehicle.

It isn’t on the top, it covers between the bottom of the hull side and the bottom of the windows. That’s the best place to put it. You need to see out the windows, armor below the bottom of the hull is obviously pointless. The only way to lower the EFP armor weight would be to lower the entire hull and reduce blast production.

I would have thought the important areas for them to be would be on the belly and lower half of the hull, which should in theory move the centre of gravity down.

The whole advantage of the EFP for insurgents was that they could be concealed along the sides of the road and even some distance from the side of the road, rather then being buried under the pavement which is difficult and dangerous. As a result the EFPs normally fire into the side of the hull at a slight upward angle, and it’s the lower side of the hull that was armored against them. In some instances you’d get EFPs firing vertical into belly, but it wasn’t typical and the heavy drive train components, fuel tanks and steep slope of the blast pan provide some extra protection in that direction already.

http://www.armyrecognition.com/images/s ... an_640.jpg
This is a Maxxpro with the extra armor, the big rectangle on side and the square on the door. It doesn't cover everything, but it does cover the most vulnerable and exposed parts. Its also weighs well over a ton extra. Since the profile of the vehicle is high, even covering the lower side is still pretty high weight.

Yes. I'm aware. After the US pulled out and the South Vietnamese army had essentially collapsed.

The south didn’t collapse until it came under massive attack and ran out of supplies.

And the actual fall of Saigon might be relevant if the Taliban were preparing a massive conventional assault on Kabul.

That is how they took Kabul the first time you know. Not so much in the way of tanks and artillery as the NVA 1975; but they had them. The Afghan civil war in the 1990s was a conventionally oriented one as was resistance of the Northern Alliance right up until 2001.

The relevant part to this discussion is the insurgency and guerrilla war that proved very difficult to stop and was a large part of the reason there was so much domestic pressure to pull US troops out. The US was also much freer with the methods it could use back then to try and wipe out the VC and North Vietnamese guerrillas, what with the wide scale use of chemical weapons reprisal attacks cluster bombs and landmines that they would be crucified for using today.

The US did have a wider range of weapons it could employ, that doesn’t necessarily mean they were actually an advantage.

I didn't say the North was untrained.

It sure looked like you were saying that it was beating out the South because it was more skilled at fighting, which true or not doesn’t even matter here since nobody is training the Taliban on a significant scale.

The US did not have to pull out when it did for any military reason. It pulled out because of domestic political pressure was hurting the government, and the South collapsed without their support. Neither the US or South Vietnam wanted to win the war enough to keep fighting it. This doesn't mean the North would have won without the support of the USSR or China, but the USSR and China both offered enough support for the North to win.

Your earlier statements implied otherwise.

The VC themselves would not overthrow against an established government, no, no more than the IRA would overthrow Dublin.

And yet a moment ago you were insisting the ARVN could not secure its own capital against insurgency as I had said they could. Now you say they couldn’t win. Looks like you just try to shift the argument every post because you don't really know anything about what went on in any of these ways, and are trying to go ff what I say and turn it around.

They won almost every battle they fought. They failed to achieve the stated objectives they had going into the war. They pulled out because domestic political pressure made the war in Iraq untenable for them.

Actually US troops pulled out of Iraq because Iraqi political pressure demanded it and no further status of forces agreement could be reached, the Obama administration sought to extend US deployment until the bitter end but too many Iraqi politicians were against that. You really should read more on the topic before commenting, or hell, just watching the news at the time would have told you this. Meanwhile the insurgents did not win; they do not control the government. These are claims you made.

Had there not been an insurgency after the initial invasion and victory over the Iraqi armed forces that political pressure would not have existed. The insurgents, by your own admission, are now installed in the Iraqi government, mostly at low levels.

They joined the government side, actually basically none of them actually work in the government political apparatus. Some work in local security forces, most are civilians again. BUT THAT’S THE FUCKING IDEA. You end civil wars, which is what Iraq really was, by some level of reconciliation, or a large degree of annihilation. In Iraq the former has happened after a bad brush with the later repelled the population on all sides.

The Iraqi government has been assessed as being the most corrupt government in the middle east. That's not a democracy, not even an optimal democracy, any more than Syria is a democracy. Now, if you want to claim that setting up a democracy was never really the goal, I'm willing to accept that as a premise, but what has happened in Iraq is not what the US stated they wanted to happen.

The government that exists now was installed by free elections. That is a democracy however shitty; they still haven't had time to steal the 200~ billion stolen in Nigeria. If the government refuses to leave after the next elections, then yeah, it would be kind of like Syria but given its coalition nature that seems unlikely.

Sorry, everything I read says that the US plans to have its troops pulled out by 2014, and most (non political) analysis I read of the situation is that that is too soon,and the ANA and ANP will not be ready to take on the brunt of the work by then, and that the Karzai government will not retain control in part because the Taliban is still strong enough to create chaos and then seize power from that. It's all well and good to say that there are the same level of securioty forces, but there are still problems getting members of the ANA or ANP to even turn up to operations on time, let alone effectively plan them or carry them out.

Sure problems exist, but in the end the ANA doesn’t have to be as good as the US, it just has to beat the Taliban strategically. As for US plans, they wont release full details yet but its been agreed in principal.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-04-2 ... -2014.html

Of course its fucking colonialism, you have already invaded a country for the purpose of tearing down its government and installing one of your choosing, it doesn't get much more colonial than that. You can put in a Afghan bloke you call president if you want, but if you are going to take that position away from him as soon as he goes against you he is a puppet, and people looking on are well within their rights to call bullshit.

Funny, you might notice how the US just handed over major prisons to Afghan control, agreed to cease night raids and agreed to share a lot more of its own intelligence and operations planning with the Afghan military. All of that not because the US wanted, but because Karzai and Afghan politicians wanted it. Meanwhile under you plan, it’s the US rules, US people, every single time with no recourse even on paper. Fucking stupid is what that is.

A puppet is a puppet. It doesn't matter if it's Ghengis Kahn or Ghandi, if they can't make their own decisions in running a government then one is really as bad as the other to the people being told what they are getting is an election. Random people are already being denied authority when you roll in and dismantle the government anyway

The country was in a civil war when we rolled in anyway. The Taliban ran, new people took over who do in fact have actual authority. Why the fuck do you think the US is negotiating a extension of its stay in the first place? If we believe you, none of that would happen because the US would just order Karzai to sign whatever we wanted, and if we adapted you plan it wouldn’t even go that far because nobody would exist at all to sign anything.

Dragging people from all over the country into areas they have no stake in defending is part of the problem. There are huge swathes of country that members of the ANA and ANP just do no give a shit about because of tribal rivalries or apathy. This isn't the US where someone from LA is going to be equally upset if Boston or Orlando are bombed. You need to get them to work on things they care about first, then worry about wider problems. You can actually start to funnel more of your own troops into problem areas then because the troops you leave behind are going to be far more motivated to defend their areas of responsibility, their house and their neighbours veggie patch.

You are so retarded it is just amazing. You think that’s a problem, and yet you think these same people would come and fight for the US alone because it said so? You really have no comprehension of this at all. You keep using the term puppet. Why do you think puppets exist in the first place in history? It’s because even a bullshit puppet is more effective at getting stuff done then declaring someone your direct underling and ordering them about.

[MKSheppard]

Shep, please stop before you hurt yourself. All the toys in the world can't help you win a guerrilla war- in fact, the more toys you have, the less your chances are of winning.

BZZT. Wrong. By your logic, the African Child Soldier with Machete, AK-47, drugs and loot sack is the ideal anti-guerilla troop; cheap enough to be equipped enmasse to cover the country, and cheap enough to be expendable utterly...

Furthermore, the means to win those loyalties [of the population] are, as I said, not things that can be turned out on an assembly line.

BZZT. Wrong.

Guerrilla warfare is ultimately a psychological contest for the loyalties of the populace you fight among, and indiscriminate use of artillery causes you to lose no matter how many people you shred.

That's nice. Did you recite that from the wikipedia definition of counterinsurgency? You're not exactly quite impressing me with your reasoning here to be honest, because your understanding of armed conflicts seems to have stopped at around 1945.

Let's go to your original post:

because the mechanisms for winning guerrilla warfare are not ones that can be rolled off Northrup Grumman or Halliburton production lines.

That line shows how little you really know; because the military shroomdustrial complex has changed significantly since the end of the Cold War, with many corporations moving out of traditional Freedomizer[tm] products, such as fast tactical jets or strategic bombers and into non-traditional products which are very well suited to COIN.

There's the GORGON STARE/CONSTANT HAWK/ANGEL FIRE/ARGUS line of development for wide area surveillance that lets a single unmanned UAV with sufficient payload simply cover every damn thing going on within a multi kilometer radius in home video.

ARGUS-IS test at MCB Quantico back in 2009

ARGUS-IS was basically designed to cover 40 square kilometers at 15 fps and then allow up to 65 individual little video windows to be streamed to users from that huge 1.8 gigapixel main image.

When you combine that with a downlink station with sufficient hard drive space and the IT to sift through it all, it quickly becomes a major impediment to guerillas.

Convoy get attacked on a road? Just call your orbiting aerial spy drone division built by the MIC; and ask them to go through the last x hours of video of that road until you find the bad guys, and then track the bad guys from that point; see where they came from, etc.

A simpler version of this technology already was used at about the mid-point in the Iraq war to fight IEDs -- they would fly a drone over a dangerous highway at regular intervals, and before convoys went over it; and then run special image analysis software designed by military industrial complex programmers that rapidly searched and compared multiple sets of images to find stuff that was there/not there before.

Like say that trash pile at kilometer 5.3 on DeathHighway 666? It wasn't there the night before. Ergo, it is probably an EFP/IED emplacement. So tell the convoy to be on guard there.

There's also airborne platforms looking for fertilizer signatures.

Link

To cut through the bureaucratese, Ursus is a surveillance program housed in a pod on the bottom of a piloted commercial King Air twin-engine turboprop plane (the MC-12 is one such modified aircraft) that hunts down the chemical signatures of fertilizers used in Afghanistan’s IEDs.

How Good is all this? Pretty damn good.

2400 dead IED emplacers

And that's with Information Technology four years old.

Elsewhere, there's BIOMETRICS, run by the evil military shroomdustrial complex -- and it's proving useful in areas like Afghanistan where government ID is practically non existent.

Link

Link 2

Basically, US/NATO troops are photographing the irises of about half a million Afghans at checkpoints and such, or when we capture them. This makes it harder for insurgents to hide in the great masses.

Additionally, find an IED or dropped weapon? We put NCIS onto it to fingerprint or DNA swab said weapon; and the process works even if it detonated; since a lot is left behind when it goes boom.

Link 3

Link 4

Link 5

You take away the "sea of the masses" that the guerilla swims through; and do it via military shroomdustrial complex bloated IT spending; rather than forcing everyone to be relocated into "strategic hamlets" at gunpoint, etc; thus reducing the outrage of the population at you.

Even good old conventional weapons are much smarter; reducing population outrage.

Current warhead in the M31 GMLRS is 200 pounds of HE; which is small enough to allow it to be used relatively close to schools, hospitals, and mosques with little collateral damage; but the military industrial complex is not resting on it's laurels:

Link

Lockheed Martin (NYSE: LMT) today tested a new Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System-Plus (GMLRS+) ‘scalable effects’ warhead, which enables users to select the range of the warhead’s detonation power depending on the target.

“The ‘scalable effects’ warhead was set to low-yield prior to the flight and scored a direct hit on the target,” said Scott Arnold, vice president of precision fires in Lockheed Martin’s Missiles and Fire Control business. “The performance of both the GMLRS+ rocket and the scalable effects warhead were outstanding, validating our continued investment in evolving the proven GMLRS weapon system to address current and future threats.”

This test at White Sands Missile Range, N.M., was the second of two GMLRS+ launches scheduled for 2011. In early August, a GMLRS+ round successfully completed a 120-kilometer mission, an improvement in range of approximately 50 kilometers over the current GMLRS round. Both tests were internally funded by Lockheed Martin and Aerojet and were supported by the U.S. Army’s Precision Fires Program Office.

This new warhead will have a scaleable range going from 50 to 250 pounds of conventional HE in a single package; allowing ever more precise fires with lower collateral damage; and thus lesser civilian outrage.

Elsewhere, the Navy is fielding the Advanced Precision Kill Weapon System (APKWS) right now in Afghanistan. It's just your good old HYDRA 70mm FFAR rocket, but now with laser-guidance; meaning a smaller warhead than Hellfire, meaning less collateral damage.

Over on the FORCE PROTECTION side, the American Soldier of 2012 is equipped differently than the one who rolled into Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003; as we've gone through several generations of body armor; providing better protection, along with the wide introduction of a lot of little pieces of equipment such as the Combat Application Tourniquet (CAT), which is unique in that it can be applied and tightened with a single hand.

This means that US casualties are much lower than they'd be without them, and if you can't figure out why this is important in COIN/Guerilla War, well then...

There's also a pretty neat force protection idea that is also nice for counterinsurgency:

Throwbots.

Instead of kicking the door down on a house and shooting first, we can send Mr Throwbot inside to see if Achmed the Jihadi is behind that door, or pretty Aa'idah and her five year old child.

The dirty little secret is that a lot of the stuff getting money thrown at it for COIN right now is pretty much pointless against a conventional opponent.

Drones because they can be shot down by any competent air defense; and a lot of the electronic warfare jamming stuff is pointless against a conventional opponent -- firstly, because a conventional opponent won't be using cellular networks, and second because he'll have anti-radiation weapons, or his own ELINT assets to find out where you are by where you're jamming.

So why was there such a furious spigot of money towards just about every scheme possible under the sun with COIN applications?

Because under the intense glare of publicity during a COIN campaign; the military's traditional budgetary processes break down, and it becomes a race to field capability the fastest and damn the cost, or having to go through three generations in five years of a system; because nobody wants to be grilled before the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense about why they haven't brought System XYZ which happens to be made in Senator Shroomatelli's district; which could have saved Mommy Shroomy's son from being blown up by an IED.

MRAP contractor writes it's own contract for MRAPs with DoD

A really good article on the anti-IED war in Iraq -- tl;dr a whole shitload of fifty billion jammers get bought from tons of defense contractors

By contrast, conventional warfare procurement occurs at a much more sedate and thoughtful pace; where a minor improvement of say, 10% over existing systems is not enough to get it into production.

Additionally...

In conventional wars; contractors are limited to basic support roles; being technical representatives sent forward to work with the troops to train them on the Mk 1 Shepponuker; and to keep the Shepponuker working under adverse conditions, supporting the regular maintenance troops.


TechRep working on F-4C in the field in Vietshroom.

At the very worst, you get thinktanks writing papers on why we should adopt the Mk 2 Shepponuker, for it will restore military superiority over the Godless Communist hordes; and that we should all inject schoolchildren with iodine -- any developmental defects are balanced off by the derived 1% post-attack environment superiority over the commie.

Said report costs $10k and is delivered to General Shroom who hrumphs, and it is filed away never to be seen again.

When you move into unconventional guerilla/COIN campaigns...well....hurm.

Some good reading, More Good Reading

Because contractors getting blown up doesn't make for bad press back home; since they're not soldiers; and additionally, they don't count against military manpower limits set in US Law.

[MKSheppard]

If the above was too link-dumpy, here's a really short condensed version.

There are three basic ways to fight and win a guerilla war/COIN.

Way #1: Kill everyone until they stop resisting. Last successfully implemented in Afghanistan by Alexander the Great. Not feasible today due to political backlash, global discouragement etc.

Way #2: Flood the place with manpower, and put a man with a rifle on every corner. While feasible on paper, such a deployment forces you to a very low technical level for deployed forces. The US and Soviet Union could have done this in Vietnam or Afghanistan, at the price of everyone using WWII surplus equipment. The huge cost of the deployed forces and maintaining them (even a simple infantry force is expensive when you get into the 10^6 scale) precludes any advanced technology. You are essentially fighting at just above the technological level of the insurgents; and this means your casualties will be heavy, making this approach infeasible for an advanced power such as the United States or Soviet Union.

Way #3: Deploy a mixture of manpower and high technology. Implemented by the US in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan; and the USSR in Afghanistan. Use high technology to offset manpower needs and reduce politically risky troop fatalities via overmatch. Soviets despite their huge army, had to maintain huge land forces on the Inner German Border and Chinese Border, so they could not steal half the Soviet Army to put it in Afghanistan; and even the Politburo cared about civilian unrest caused by mass casualties.

The Soviet war in Afghanistan was very technically advanced, contrary to the mass media impression of it being "spam toy-shaped bomblets to maim children." Like the US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq from 2001 onwards; the USSR constantly pushed out a stream of improved weapons and equipment to the troops, such as body armor and improved AFV turrets which could elevate their weapons to +50~ degrees, as opposed to +30~ degrees, something really important in mountain fighting.

The US in Iraq/Afghanistan for the last ten years has tended more on the side of high technology than manpower; because we simply don't have the manpower anymore to put half a million troops overseas like we did during Operation Desert Storm when the US Army was much bigger. What we do have over 1991 is a much larger information technology industry domestically...

[PeZook]

I'd also like to point out the fact that overpriced construction/development/catering contracts are something that Halliburton does very well on, too, and they're definitely a way to win at COIN outside weapons and surveillance tech.

[thejester]

If the above was too link-dumpy, here's a really short condensed version.

There are three basic ways to fight and win a guerilla war/COIN.

Way #1: Kill everyone until they stop resisting. Last successfully implemented in Afghanistan by Alexander the Great. Not feasible today due to political backlash, global discouragement etc.

Way #2: Flood the place with manpower, and put a man with a rifle on every corner. While feasible on paper, such a deployment forces you to a very low technical level for deployed forces. The US and Soviet Union could have done this in Vietnam or Afghanistan, at the price of everyone using WWII surplus equipment. The huge cost of the deployed forces and maintaining them (even a simple infantry force is expensive when you get into the 10^6 scale) precludes any advanced technology. You are essentially fighting at just above the technological level of the insurgents; and this means your casualties will be heavy, making this approach infeasible for an advanced power such as the United States or Soviet Union.

Way #3: Deploy a mixture of manpower and high technology. Implemented by the US in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan; and the USSR in Afghanistan. Use high technology to offset manpower needs and reduce politically risky troop fatalities via overmatch. Soviets despite their huge army, had to maintain huge land forces on the Inner German Border and Chinese Border, so they could not steal half the Soviet Army to put it in Afghanistan; and even the Politburo cared about civilian unrest caused by mass casualties.

The Soviet war in Afghanistan was very technically advanced, contrary to the mass media impression of it being "spam toy-shaped bomblets to maim children." Like the US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq from 2001 onwards; the USSR constantly pushed out a stream of improved weapons and equipment to the troops, such as body armor and improved AFV turrets which could elevate their weapons to +50~ degrees, as opposed to +30~ degrees, something really important in mountain fighting.

The US in Iraq/Afghanistan for the last ten years has tended more on the side of high technology than manpower; because we simply don't have the manpower anymore to put half a million troops overseas like we did during Operation Desert Storm when the US Army was much bigger. What we do have over 1991 is a much larger information technology industry domestically...

Is this a serious post? Do you honestly think that the wars in Afghanistan and the war in Iraq were won and lost on the back of how awesome your UAV optics were and the ability to elevate turret guns? And before you answer (as you inevitably will) with a massive infodump about smaller bombs and something to do with shroom, riddle me this: what was more important in reducing violence in Iraq, the technofetish shit you just listed or the Sunni awakening?

(Hint: if you answer the former, you are wrong.)

[PeZook]

Is this a serious post? Do you honestly think that the wars in Afghanistan and the war in Iraq were won and lost on the back of how awesome your UAV optics were and the ability to elevate turret guns? And before you answer (as you inevitably will) with a massive infodump about smaller bombs and something to do with shroom, riddle me this: what was more important in reducing violence in Iraq, the technofetish shit you just listed or the Sunni awakening?

(Hint: if you answer the former, you are wrong.)

Wasn't the original point that the military-industrial complex doesn't like guerilla warfare because supposedly they can't make utterly massive piles of cash out of it?

[Simon_Jester]

Thinking about this, there's a synergy between the social and the military aspects of guerilla war. On the guerilla side of the line this is obvious- read Lawrence, for example, who was one of the early guerilla theorists and to whom a lot of the ideas of guerilla warfare came as an epiphany he actually explained in writing. But on the counterinsurgency side... well, I think it's still true.

If your soldiers are losing left and right, it's going to be very hard to convince the people to support you and oppose the guerillas, so you can't win. And your own government will soon want to recall the troops, so you'll probably lose.

If your soldiers win often and easily, guerillas and guerilla leaders are frequently caught and killed, and so on... it is a LOT easier to end the war. While we often talk about guerillas having a bottomless supply of manpower, they really don't, unless you commit a lot of atrocities and manage to outrage 1.1 or more people into joining the guerillas per guerilla you kill.

All the fancy-pants stuff makes the difference between having soldiers who are chumps and easy to ambush, versus having soldiers who are hard to ambush. Also good at tracking down the people who did it without killing so damn many innocent people along with the guerillas (a huge problem in Vietnam, which did a lot to make the US lose as if there weren't enough reasons the US lost already).

In itself, that won't be decisive. But in itself, the social stuff won't be decisive either because a lot of it won't work if your troops can't provide security from guerilla warfare tactics in important bits of the country, without taking unacceptable losses and without resorting to massive brutality that turns the entire population 100% against you.

Otherwise, you wouldn't need soldiers to end guerilla wars at all... and not bothering to oppose the guerillas with armed force doesn't lead to victory.

Wars can be won for more than one reason. Getting the politics right and having good equipment aren't mutually exclusive, and I think you need both if you want to win guerilla wars without mass manpower or mass brutality.

[thejester]

Is this a serious post? Do you honestly think that the wars in Afghanistan and the war in Iraq were won and lost on the back of how awesome your UAV optics were and the ability to elevate turret guns? And before you answer (as you inevitably will) with a massive infodump about smaller bombs and something to do with shroom, riddle me this: what was more important in reducing violence in Iraq, the technofetish shit you just listed or the Sunni awakening?

(Hint: if you answer the former, you are wrong.)

Wasn't the original point that the military-industrial complex doesn't like guerilla warfare because supposedly they can't make utterly massive piles of cash out of it?

No. The original point (which I don't agree with) is that the military-industrial complex relies on a public assumption that it's effective, an assumption guerrilla warfare undercuts. It can still make tons of cash in the short term but in the long term it will come under intense scrutiny that will hurt it. I dunno, it's Bakustra's argument and if you look earlier in the thread the difference between 'makes shitload of cash' and what is actually being argued has already been articulated.

Wars can be won for more than one reason. Getting the politics right and having good equipment aren't mutually exclusive, and I think you need both if you want to win guerilla wars without mass manpower or mass brutality.

Except you've conflated security with 'good equipment' and the two aren't the same at all; and while you've identified security as an important prerequisite in successful counterinsurgency, you've failed to follow through on your own point that security is in turn a perquisite for political action, which is the actual important part. Note also that Shep's example of technological success deal with violence directed by the insurgent against the security force - and not the security force, but the third party security force. How does this model protect the civilian population, the actual centre of gravity of the war? How do you protect a populace engaged in day to day living from intimidation and violence with drones? Again, look at Iraq - what was more important, the latest whiz-bang anti-IED solution or the Sunni populace deciding it had had enough, removing a huge slab of support for the insurgency and dramatically changing the political dynamic in Iraq?

[Simon_Jester]

Wars can be won for more than one reason. Getting the politics right and having good equipment aren't mutually exclusive, and I think you need both if you want to win guerilla wars without mass manpower or mass brutality.

Except you've conflated security with 'good equipment' and the two aren't the same at all; and while you've identified security as an important prerequisite in successful counterinsurgency, you've failed to follow through on your own point that security is in turn a perquisite for political action, which is the actual important part.

I agree that it is, but not that this is a failure on my part: knowing that security is a prerequisite for political action, better security makes political action go easier (less effective opposition, an easier time presenting a visible front of security and patrol and flag-showing for the new government among the people).

It may or may not be decisive- although consider the extreme limiting cases and it becomes clear how being faced with exotic technologies can make the guerillas' job a lot harder, while not having to worry about advanced technology makes it easier. There are a lot of things the Viet Cong could get away with that wouldn't have worked so well in Iraq or Afghanistan simply because the occupiers knew to watch for them and had tools in place to help counter them.

Note also that Shep's example of technological success deal with violence directed by the insurgent against the security force - and not the security force, but the third party security force. How does this model protect the civilian population, the actual centre of gravity of the war? How do you protect a populace engaged in day to day living from intimidation and violence with drones? Again, look at Iraq - what was more important, the latest whiz-bang anti-IED solution or the Sunni populace deciding it had had enough, removing a huge slab of support for the insurgency and dramatically changing the political dynamic in Iraq?

It doesn't, not directly. It can be made pointless if you screw up the face-to-face aspect. But done right, it can help: your patrols move more freely and are more visible, making people more secure. You harass random turnip farmers less frequently, making people feel more secure with you than with the guerillas. Guerilla leaders are quickly identified and forced into hiding, making people feel less secure with the guerillas than with you, and so on.

Or, you can do all these things. Having the tools at least makes them easier than they would be if your soldiers had, say, nothing but WWII surplus gear. Or Vietnam surplus gear.

Also, making your soldiers less likely to get killed makes them less twitchy, fearful, and atrocity-prone, it makes it easier to keep your troops in country long enough to get the new government up and running. There are desirable net effects here, and you can leverage them to help win. That much, I think, makes sense.

I mean, "superior technology" doesn't automatically guarantee a win in conventional war either. But it sure helps, and if you're a rich country it's just common sense that if you're going to go to war, you throw some serious money at the war to spare yourself casualties and hopefully win it a bit faster.

[PeZook]

No. The original point (which I don't agree with) is that the military-industrial complex relies on a public assumption that it's effective, an assumption guerrilla warfare undercuts. It can still make tons of cash in the short term but in the long term it will come under intense scrutiny that will hurt it. I dunno, it's Bakustra's argument and if you look earlier in the thread the difference between 'makes shitload of cash' and what is actually being argued has already been articulated.

But then Shep's post clearly demonstrates that the military-industrial complex isn't coming under intense scrutiny, gets piles of expensive contracts, and even gets paid to recommend solutions to problems, solutions which - effective or not - come out of weapon production lines! And best of all, these toys are useless or next to useless to fighting a conventional war, so the US government has to continue their usual orders and procure entirely new toys, to fight a war which, even if it's lost utterly, doesn't harm the factories used to make all that stuff.