A story older than recorded history.

Quote Originally Posted by Fuchs View Post
Uhmm, you realize that changing a military culture and building a new army are two different activities?
No, I realize that sometimes that is true but, far more often, the two actions have to go hand in hand. As I said at the start of the thread, you cannot use western norms in dealing with non-western nations. That was true in all of the examples you or I elected to use. West is west, east is east and never the twain shall meet and all that.
I was writing about changing how an army works/fights. That has always taken a long time because old superiors persist and retain old methods. To build a new army is a completely different affair, obviously.
True but every example you cited was just that, building a new Army. As I said, you can't have it both ways...
You arranged statements to create a contradiction although there was no connection.
Not so, I repeated them in sequence and in context.
The thing that changes is the available time. If "culture" prevents the quick (few years) creation of effective armed forces, then this needs to be included as argument in the original decision-making whether to start/articipate in the conflict as a foreign power. I wrote that before.
Yes you did -- and I agreed but pointed out that the policy argument is a different issue.
...I have an impression that option (2) was too often assumed to be true, that this assumption is the default assumption and that this has led to several failures in the past.
We can agree on that.
Ken; the basic dispute here is between your "the job needs to be done" attitude and my "looks like some decisions were wrong" attitude. You pretty much insist that the time for mission accomplishment has to be granted. That ignores the often excessive price that needs to be paid to buy that time, and that some missions are simply not worth that price.
Yes and no. I agree with that premise as you just stated it except I do not insist the time has to be granted -- I insist that is the time required; the decision to grant that time is a policy decision. In all cases cited, that decision was made by or for the policymakers to do so.

My point with past (and present, including Georgia) examples you cited is that the policy argument is totally immaterial; those things are history. Whether they should have been done that way or not is another issue and one that IMO is irrelevant; they happened the way they did and we cannot undo them. We have agreed, in a fashion, that the time required to train a force to include necessary culture changes should unquestionably be a consideration. Whether it will be or not remains to be seen.
Imagine this scenario:
year 2002...
. . .
case closed, invasion won't happen, nobody is willing to fight a 10 year war for the expected benefits
True, no doubt about that. That's why the issue was not discussed by the politicians and the media, most of whom did not know that -- and those who did didn't want to mention it. That's why Bill Clinton said we'd be in Bosnia (and Kosovo) for a year. Again, that's not a training time argument, that's a policy argument -- and on that we agree; it should be considered.

However, I think that means we expect rational thought from Politicians -- an unlikely event...