Quote Originally Posted by Ken White View Post
One brigade does not an Army make -- and it probably has no control over the Politicians...Try South Korea in particular but also El Salvador and the Philippines. For that matter, the Viet Namese weren't great, cultural thing -- but they weren't that bad, they were able to beat the North but that's hard to do with no ammo or fuel. Politicians again...

Yet again you let your desire to snipe cause you to display either a lack of knowledge or outright bias.
Iraq (5 years and still not capable enough for troop withdrawals),
Afghanistan (6 years and deteriorating civil war situation),
South Vietnam (clearly lost after about a decade of training by the U.S.),
exile Cubans (Bay of Pigs),
South Korea (which got OVERRUN in 1950 after being equipped & trained by the U.S. for several years)
were not really encouraging examples.
El Salvador's government forces weren't really competent either, the war lasted for twelve years and the standards of behaviour and discipline on the government side were much lesser than desirable.
Philippines? You mean the army of such a big country finally taking control of a tiny island group was an achievement?

Even a infantry-heavy, but competently executed assault of well-trained battalions should have gained 20-30 km ground in SO before the Russian advance guard arrived. There were many flanking opportunities through the forests.

"Lack of knowledge", "bias"?
How about not closing the eyes when I see unfavourable facts?

The U.S. forces have failed to train foreign armies properly in time spans that were longer than the American Civil War or the First World War. That's outright failure.
Such training missions should be expected to train foreign troops in a year up to junior NCO and in two years up to medium-rank officers. That's the speed of training demonstrated by national armies after mobilization.

There's no such excuse like cultural problems. The South Vietnamese had the same culture as the North Vietnamese. It was not on part of the Vietnamese if a cultural problem was prohibiting a successful training.

It's a joke that the occupiers still cannot be satisfied with the training standard of most Iraqi and Afghanistan units after 5-6 years.
Imagine the U.S.Army had been ready to deploy to Europe in 1923 and 1948 for its participation in the European theatre of both world wars!

And yes, I sniped at these training programs because reality and the expectations that some people expressed somewhere else were so far apart.
Some equaled U.S. training with excellent competence. as if the Green Berets somehow handed out silver bullets. The experiences look differently.

The problem is btw quite relevant for the small war topic in general.
There's no way how to build nations during an armed conflict if your military needs a decade or more to properly train that nation's ground forces.