Quote Originally Posted by Fuchs View Post
I have two pet theories about how to handle small wars as the one in AFG:...
But what are we going to do about the politicians???
Meanwhile, the standard Western approach under U.S. leadership is to send relatively few occupation troops, rotate them and reinforce them if politicians get too much under pressure by poor news about the occupation.
In the US case, that's a forced error due to our personnel system and Congressional pressure -- unfortunately, US domestic political concerns outweigh both military and foreign policy issues. That does not mean the rest of a coalition has to do the same thing; that they opt to do so is a lick on them -- or also a function of their domestic political pressures...
In parallel, indigenous puppet regime forces are being built from scratch, perform rather poorly and are unreliable for many reasons.
True. Never a good idea but it seems hard to break the mold.