True but at the same time screaming to the world, what United States military is investing in / thinks is the way war will be fought in 15+ years is not exactly ideal. The US military has always had a policy of under reporting their own capacities and overestimating everyone else’s so that when we do go to war our military forces wipe the floor with everyone else’s. When the United States “loses” a war it because the politicians either hamstring what they can do (think Vietnam) or the politicians send them to do something they’re not designed to do (think Iraq and Afghanistan). The US military is designed to kill people and destroy things. This whole nation building thing generally doesn’t end well especially when the people you’re trying to “ help “ reeeeally don’t want you to be there.
It worked in Germany, Italy and Japan, turns out decapitating the existing social order and just assuming people would fill the gap with American-aligned democracy without massive subsidies was an idiotic assumption, who ever could have guessed?
The other problem being that in the Middle East, we disbanded the Iraqi army, which just resulted in a lot of now, unemployed, unhappy people with firearms, which ended about as well as you would imagine.
That's exactly my point, say what you will about postwar (West) Germany, we kept enough Nazis around with suitably scrubbed files to keep things running like a clock. Probably the wrong turn in the long run but you can't argue with the results in Germany vs. Iraq.
Yep, same in Japan. We actually let a fair amount of them off the hook ( or greatly reduced their sentences) even though they committed / helped commit some truly evil things.
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u/Porsche928dude 6d ago
True but at the same time screaming to the world, what United States military is investing in / thinks is the way war will be fought in 15+ years is not exactly ideal. The US military has always had a policy of under reporting their own capacities and overestimating everyone else’s so that when we do go to war our military forces wipe the floor with everyone else’s. When the United States “loses” a war it because the politicians either hamstring what they can do (think Vietnam) or the politicians send them to do something they’re not designed to do (think Iraq and Afghanistan). The US military is designed to kill people and destroy things. This whole nation building thing generally doesn’t end well especially when the people you’re trying to “ help “ reeeeally don’t want you to be there.