I think they were, but on both counts I would like to know for certain by way of someone who can say...well...for certain. There must be SOMEONE on the Escapist with a little soldiering...thaluikhain said:
War Game Theory: Could an old-fashioned war of conquest be stopped without nuclear weapons?
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To clarify, a smaller force can cause problems for a larger one (that's a major reason for having certain special forces), but in the case of an insurgency or revolution, you need revolutionaries and insurgents. Failures of US/ARVN policy generally revolve around alienating the locals and driving them into the VC (the strategic hamlet program, for example). One of the traditional ways to get a successful insurgency going is to poke the authorities to lashing around wildly and angering the people.FalloutJack said:
For that matter, you have other special forces that exist purely to form or support local groups.
ISIL advance has only been possible because of political failures in Iraq and later dealing with Syria. The Iraqi militias are commanded by an Iranian General from the Revolutionary Guards. The current Iraqi government is really a client of Iran and the Iraqi army is unsurprisingly uncooperative. The military get the blame for flawed political decisions for partial commitments that are insufficient for the task and end making the situation worse. Part of the problem is lack of military experience amongst politicians. In the previous generations many had frontline experience.Elementary - Dear Watson said:Hmm... I've worked out with the jets, and most of what we do is Close Air Support. Yes, we certainly put pressure on the lines of communication but we maintain rather than advance the efforts against them. Ground retaken is done by units on the ground whom are only trained and advised by the west.
There is also the fact that the surrounding countries could always do more. People don't want it to spiral into full blown wide area conflict, but if the countries over the borders to Iraq and Syria feel the pressure enough more would be done to help. Obviously the reason they sit on the fence now is that Iran, Syria and Iraq have Shia leadership and the rest are Sunni. Their inclusion would upset the balance if the need isn't great enough.
Of course, the West could always do more as well. And if it looked desperate enough we probably would, the issue of course being that the military is very good at fighting and holding territory. We were not employed and trained to establish and create a new country in the vacuum and wake of where we have been. That is down to politicians, diplomats and international organisations, who often fall below the mark. The military then get the blame as we are the ones overtly on the ground!Always a shame...
FalloutJack said:
The Vietnam war was a limited war not a full scale war. The US at any time could have sent and overwhelming force into the North but did not do so because of the risk of escalation into a war with the Soviet Union. The US only used limted airpower in the North and when Nixon authorised the those limited strikes it brought the North to the table so the US could get out. To quote General Giap, the commander of the NVA " We lost every battle but won the war" The North won by politics not by the battlefield and by paying a dreadful human cost. The communist forces lost, by there own admission, by 1968 half a million mean. Any Western general would not survive that kind of diastar. If you remove the wider cold war from the Vietnam war, the North would not have won.
I know it's not the same, but I feel that something could be learned from it, certainly for this theoretical doom war.albino boo said:
Eh, declassified stuff about those sorts of things is all over the net. The US army is quite good with printing Field Manuals and Training Manuals about absolutely everything and then sticking "distribution is unlimited" on it.FalloutJack said:
On a limited scale, yes. Lots of nations have special forces trained to operate behind enemy lines for long(ish) periods, but these are small in number without local support. In which case it's vital to have your supply caches in place in advance.FalloutJack said:
A genocidal war of this sort is unprecedented in modern warfare, there's usually some locals to hide amongst when you aren't blowing up bridges and railways.
What can be learned is that light forces get chewed by heavy forces. That in a war with no borders firepower triumphs. If you want a realistic scenario then look at the surprise attack options from the Soviet Union or North Korea. The broad outline is a rapid transition from peace to war, less than 24 hours. The opening phase would involve commando raids on air bases, command posts, railyards and ports. Then you have air assault regiments grabbing vital bridges and road junctions. Next, massed armoured formations would cross the border hitting unprepared and not deployed defending units. The Soviet plan had Hamburg falling within the first 36 hours and the Rhine being reached within 7 days. You cant do that with infantry.FalloutJack said:
You know, part of the problem with this entire thread is that most of the really outrageous historical conquests happened either due to one in a million circumstances, monumental incompetence in the part of the conquered, or a combination of the two, and rarely the genius tactics or superiority of the conqueror.
The mongol conquest of China? Made possible by the "civilized" nomads manning the northern border-fortresses of the empire just handing over the keys and joining Genghis Khan. The European conquest of the great Meso-American empires? It was made possible by hundreds of thousand of rebels joining them, plus whatever diseases the Spanish brought along with them to the new world. The Nazi blitzkrieg? On the western front they simply went around the Maginot line, while on the east Stalin was so convinced that Hitler would not break his non-aggression treaty that he went into a drunker stupor for a week after hearing the news and there was no one around to make decisions in his absence because he killed off and exiled all his generals out of pure paranoia.
So yeah, if you want to know who would win in a hypothetical, unrealistic land-war between modern Earth's power-blocks, its the one that ends up as the last to screw up, because there would be no one left to exploit them.
The mongol conquest of China? Made possible by the "civilized" nomads manning the northern border-fortresses of the empire just handing over the keys and joining Genghis Khan. The European conquest of the great Meso-American empires? It was made possible by hundreds of thousand of rebels joining them, plus whatever diseases the Spanish brought along with them to the new world. The Nazi blitzkrieg? On the western front they simply went around the Maginot line, while on the east Stalin was so convinced that Hitler would not break his non-aggression treaty that he went into a drunker stupor for a week after hearing the news and there was no one around to make decisions in his absence because he killed off and exiled all his generals out of pure paranoia.
So yeah, if you want to know who would win in a hypothetical, unrealistic land-war between modern Earth's power-blocks, its the one that ends up as the last to screw up, because there would be no one left to exploit them.
you realize the outposts were "use 'em or lose 'em" expandable assets, right? They're not suppose to win. They're suppose to create chaos, which they would. Yes, they may die, but that isn't the point. (And that is only assuming you get them in a stand-up fight.) The point is that since they're there, they may as well do something useful. That was the only point. They're a disruptive element that helps the big evil plan along, but it isn't their contribution that the whole thing hinges upon.albino boo said:
You lose to them for no gain. There is no advantage over normal special force operations. You would be spending a lot of money for not a lot of combat power. There is a reason why nations spend money on tanks, spgs, apcs and ifvs rather the straight leg infantry. Even the CPLA equips every army formation with at least trucks. It's been the case in high intensity warfare, for the last 70 years, that mobility and firepower offered by armoured formations win wars.FalloutJack said:
I have no idea if that's true or not. Since the goal was to occupy time and resources and that game is not exactly predictable, one cannot say with total certainty.albino boo said:
