The USA had its worst defeat since Vietnam a while back and nobody noticed:

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

These two articles

http://www.theatlanticwire.com/global/2012/09/us-suffered-its-worst-airpower-loss-vietnam-last-week-and-no-one-really-noticed/57139/

http://newmediajournal.us/indx.php/item/6927

discuss that the USA in a recent Taliban attack suffered its worst defeat since the Battle of Kham Duc, where a similar method of attacking US air power actually did work and work very welll for the Viet Cong.

There are two ways to analyze this. At the first level this is a sign that after ten years of a protracted war between the USA and irregular troops the USA's military effectiveness is slipping and in a bad pattern at that. The Taliban likewise are getting better at waging war against us, which one might expect after ten years to learn and to adapt to US methods, which have tended to be firepower and technology over other methods. Which works up until the technologically poorer side decides to attack the airplanes when they're on the ground as opposed to trying to shoot them down in the air.

Second, this is a point that calls into question why the USA is maintaining troops in Afghanistan at all at this point. Osama bin Laden is dead, but Karzai has as much chance to hold back the Taliban as Nyguen van Thieu did to hold back North Vietnam, if not far, far less than that. All that running an already-lost war forever does is keeping the death toll rising, it does not solve issues at any point beyond that. If the Taliban rise, furthermore, it actually would be the first thing since the invasion that deposed them that the USA has done to tie down Iranian strength, as the Iranians no more love the Taliban now than they did during their war against the Northern Alliance. At least when the Soviets had the sense to up and leave they did so by winning a spectacular, if barren and hollow, victory at Operation Majistral. It seems the USA hasn't learned from Vietnam that if we must back one side in a civil war as our proxies to find proxies that can actually fight and intimidate their enemies and won't be bushwhacking us in its spare time.

What never worked in the 1970s won't be more successful now.

Comments

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

So what do they want instead? Helicopters tipped over buildings with RPGs being fired on camera all over again?

[mahnmut.livejournal.com]

Perhaps if we could make the entire military of drones and clones... And little white blobs running on our screens...

Pow! Pow! Pow! Triple combo! 150 pts! You pass to the next level!

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

That wouldn't work either. Cloning large animals isn't feasible in terms of them actually surviving the results of the procedure, as yet, and you'd need 18 or so years for your new class of soldiers to come into being. Trying child soldiers never works anywhere.

Drones? All the air power in the world won't work without boots on the ground and the day they make AI tanks is the day we're officially in Skynet territory.

[danalwyn.livejournal.com]

It exposes another weakness in the US approach - the US is now unwilling to take casualties in critical equipment. While the US remains predominantly equipped and trained to re-fight WWII, the equipment that we use has gotten so expensive and so difficult to replace that we can't afford losses at even a moderate level. The loss of eight, ten, or even fifteen aircraft should be a minor thing when you're maintaining forward bases in dangerous, and potentially hostile foreign countries. Instead, it's a major blow to the USMC's air support. The US has gotten to the point where the only way it can fight a war is when it doesn't sustain any casualties. Guess how likely that's going to be in the future.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Um, no military ever wants casualties in critical equipment. What they want and what they get are two different things. Some militaries have to recover from more than others or focus heavily on repairing and maintaining equipment but ideally nobody would ever have to repair damaged equipment at a mass level. We are also not training to refight WWII, we stopped that around the time the WWII system failed in Vietnam. We train now to refight Desert Storm. Which means a military focused on the concepts of maneuver and firepower, not just firepower and loads and loads of dead bodies.

[rimpala.livejournal.com]

Not to mention the information side of modern war



You couldn't exactly bring this to the front lines as well in WW2...

[telemann.livejournal.com]

One wrong plug somewhere, BOOM!

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

You don't exactly bring it to modern war, either. All the fancy pants gadgets in the world, for that matter, can't prevent the enemy pulling an end run. It didn't work to stop Pearl Harbor and the Bulge in WWII, Peng Dehuai in 1950, Tet in 1968, 9/11 in 2001, or even manage to convince Bush that there really were no WMDs in Baghdad.

[danalwyn.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it just leaves us with a bit of a problem in that it is very difficult for us to recover from any losses that you might incur. I think this is worse among both the Air Force and the Navy, both of whom are in a position where literally any losses cause damage to the US's ability to deploy its power. The US still prepares to fight a peer competitor in open combat, but no longer has the capability to replace the losses that they expect on any timely manner. Imagine if those Harriers had been F-35s or F-22s - it would have taken months to replace the losses created by a single attack on an airfield.

Focusing on maneuver and shock effect is fine, but any country that does it should be prepared to suffer at least some losses when engaging in battle. The US seems to be prepared for none, and as a consequence any happenstance like this will be in danger of crippling future deployments. I've got nothing against not wanting to experience casualties in critical equipment, I just think that not preparing for it is slightly insane.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

At what point did the USA seem to not be prepared for it? The US Army's never had a problem with squandering its mens' lives unnecessarily when we get into that discussion. If they were F-35s it would have been a great service, not disservice.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

And then there's the Iraq War and what that did to the war here.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

As I never addressed the point about the USA being equipped and trained to fight WWII satisfactorily, the USA is actually nothing of the sort. The USA, required to sustain a WWII-level spending and military raised by mass conscription, would utterly fail in the attempt. Abrams tanks and Bradleys can't be manufactured on the WWII level without Soviet-style monkey model weaponry, and US military doctrine has made huge conceptual leaps over the WWII era (one can only hope so, repeating the 'genius' seen at Monte Cassino and on the Siegfried Line would ruin us). The USA is trained and equipped to refight the Second Gulf War of 1991, which really was a rapid, lopsided victory against what was at the time the fourth largest army in the world equipped with some of the most modern equipment of its time. What the USA neglects is that not every enemy it might face like that would be as passive and poorly structured for modern war as Iraq is/was.

To refight WWII or to even raise troops on the scale of 1940s America is beyond the capacity of 2012 America.

[rimpala.livejournal.com]

I think of the important differences between the Taliban and us is they are more willing to loose what they have then us, both in terms of equipment and in terms of human assets.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

High body counts aren't a measure of military effectiveness in and of themselves. Nor is a high equipment loss rate.

[rimpala.livejournal.com]

Nope, but survival is, and surviving an over decade-long invasion means you're doing something right. Taliban and Afghans in general are many things, but they're not the cowards we called them after 911, they are holding up to whatever we throw at them. They clearly know how to outlast us in their own territory.

As for equipment, equipment loss itself isn't the factor so much as the kind of equipment used or loss. They're the side that is willing to improvise more so then spending money on the best it can buy. We build tanks, they build IEDs.

[telemann.livejournal.com]

Exactly, it's their homeland, and religious martyrdom for them too.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Doesn't matter when the assertion is that their willingness to throw corpses at a military problem is a sign of being willing to do well with it. A lot of dead bodies is a lot of dead bodies.

[meus-ovatio.livejournal.com]

Six jets in 10 years? That's an A-minus in my book.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Surely ten years is enough time to learn how to do a basic VC trick from the Vietnam War. I mean I'm sure it took that long to translate the English and Vietnamese. ;)

[meus-ovatio.livejournal.com]

Harriers are pretty useless to grunts anyways. The only time we ever heard one was when it refused a fire order because of weather. We never relied on fixed-wing aircraft. Helicopters? Sure. But jets? They're a whole different world irrelevant to the groundpounder, really, no matter what "doctrine" states.

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

The problem is that Obama has been forced to fight the war with one hand tied behind his back. He should have done what Bush did: start a war somewhere else and simply walk away.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Um, what?

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

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