Reply #29: Ignorance of basic military strategy [View All]

[MadHound]

First off, never get into a war where the fighting will turn to guerilla warfare. Sure, you can bomb a place back to the stone age with high tech weaponry, but that high tech weaponry won't help you much when you're dealing with snipers, suicide bombers and IEDs. Second, when you are fighting on somebody else's home turf, you are fighting at a disadvantage. When you are fighting a guerilla warfare, facing a committed opponent, who has popular support, on their home turf, you are in for a world of shit. Third, when are fighting a war where such standard conventional markers of "victory" don't matter, like taking over the capital city, occupying major urban centers etc. then your fight is going to be a long fought, drawn out one that you will probably lose in the end. Because the enemy doesn't have to win in these cases, all they have to do is not lose, not lose their men, their moral, their support, their supplies. If they don't lose these things, if they continue on to fight for another day, and another, and another, etc., then they will, by default win.

These are lessons that we taught the British some 230 years ago. Apparently we had forgotten then by the time Vietnam rolled around(even though the French tried to warn us, what do they know:eyes:). We also should have learned this lesson again from the Russian debacle in Afghanistan. But apparently we didn't, and hear we are, losing this war that we could never really win in the first place.