The Best Trained, Most Professional Military...Just Lost Two Wars?

[Bill Moore]

Posted by Fuchs

personally don't agree with his idea to about the direction to go (pop-centric COIN) and would if at all rather treat this as a political fight (=deal with those who have influence, don't try to influence millions of people directly).

Agreed

I do believe he's more right about the "losing" thing, and consider your and dayuhan's position as rather reflexive partisan - especially in the case of Iraq, where the troubles were started more by occupation mistakes than in Afghanistan.

I differ with you here, because the author attempted without providing any supporting evidence to conflate military competence with losing strategies/policies. Sen McCain is absolutely correct when he said we have the world's best military, but that doesn't mean it will achieve national objectives if the objectives and policies are based on fantasy, or conditions exist that are well beyond a military solution. From a strictly military capability stand point we currently have the best the military in the world. There may smaller militaries that are more tactically proficient, but they are too small to overcome our mass and technological advantages in a battle (a war is different if they can survive long enough to counter our strategy). Ken is absolutely right that we could be much better if we revamped our training programs, but despite our numerous shortfalls we are still quite capable. On the other hand, our ability to develop a winning strategy is another matter altogether.

As for losing, the only one we lost is Vietnam and even calling that one a loss is debatable. We debated that enough in other forums, so we may just have to agree to disagree, but more importantly if we listened to our military experts who were familiar with the situation we wouldn't have gotten involved in the first place.

I take issue with the assertion that great armies can't be defeated. Other great armies have been defeated, the British were the best Army in the world when our colonalists defeated them, and after they were defeated they were still the best military in the world. If the British felt it was worth it and if they were willing to employ their full might against our citizens they would have won (opinion obviously), but fortunately they weren't, much like we weren't prepared to do what was necessary to win militarily in Vietnam. The Germans probably had the world's best army when WWII started, but they over extended themselves and made a few other strategic errors, but that doesn't take away from their military competence. I'm not trying to be defensive, but I think it is important to point out there is a difference between having a great military and having a great strategy. Great armies/militaries can be defeated by lesser foes if they have a better strategy, or in some cases if the better military is following such a flawed strategy it ends up defeating itself.

Furthermore I wouldn't place so much trust in the core competence of winning battles. The American way of warfare works well against near-defenceless opposition (at least superficially) and it works well with overwhelming resources.

Actually quite the opposite, we're very good at defeating miliaries that have capable defenses. They provide us targets that we well suited to destroy. I agree with the second part of your sentence, we do rely on overwhelming resources, and that may be one reason we're so bad at strategy? We don't think we need to out think our adversary if we can out muscle him. Unfortunately we do rely on industrial age strategy to mass firepower on alleged centers of gravity with large forces that are enabled with information technology. I agree we have a lot of room to increase our sophistication when it comes to strategy, yet it seems the desire for ever larger forces instead of new ways of fighting still dominates our discussion despite guidance to do otherwise. It is important to note that the Pop Centric approach requires excessively large ground forces to implement.