80% of westerners have their entire education of how conflicts (well, everything, really, lol) work from Hollywood movies where some cracker can just John Wick his way through Fallujah. They think Call of Duty is real
Keep in mind, the U.S. would routinely slaughter entire villages, counting all the old people and children they would kill as ‘casualties’. The actual Vietnamese soldier to American soldier casualty ratio was not nearly as lopsided, and quite often entire platoons of soldiers would be sent somewhere, only to be ambushed and killed outside of a few who would escape.
This is one of the reasons many Vietnam vets were so fucked up mentally coming back, was because they knew we were losing the war, that we weren’t actually killing that many Vietcong, but they would come back to the U.S. to a media what would claim that they were winning, and that they were taking extremely few casualties.
It was one of the reasons the whole MIA/POW narrative started, was to obscure the number of American casualties coming out of the war.
We decisively lost Vietnam, and the idea that we “pulled our punches” is revisionist horseshit. We killed so many civilians, corraled so many villages, and it didn’t make a single bit of difference to us winning the war.
We killed so many civilians, corraled so many villages, and it didn’t make a single bit of difference to us winning the war.
Terror bombing is absolutely fantastic at pissing the enemy off (for pretty self evident reasons), so in a way it did make a different to us winning the war.
As in: It further secured the loss of the US losing.
And an even larger cohort who are convinced that we could have won the Vietnam war if only the anti-war <slurs> had let amerikkka kill Vietnamese civilians for another five, ten years.
No western military has had to fight a war against anything resembling a peer-to-peer force since Vietnam or Korea, and by now everyone with experience in that sort of fighting is dead or retired. It’s all been air strikes and “counter insurgency” for the past 50 years. Walking around Iraq or Afghanistan until you get blown up by an IED doesn’t do much to teach you about drone combat or missile interception/avoidance, and leisurely bombing weddings doesn’t prepare you to actually avoid being shot down.
And on the contrary, the enemies of imperialism have had near constant experience adapting to American weapons and tactics
A guy I went to high-school with… I actually like him a little, but barely know him and most of my friends hate him… just joined the military this year.
I have become convinced that no Westerner knows how to actually fight a war anymore
Just fully replaced the notion of logistics and tactics with cavalry charges and shouting “Wolverines!”
80% of westerners have their entire education of how conflicts (well, everything, really, lol) work from Hollywood movies where some cracker can just John Wick his way through Fallujah. They think Call of Duty is real
Thank goodness I read books
There is a significant cohort of Americans convinced that we “won” the Vietnam war because the Vietnamese had more casualties
Keep in mind, the U.S. would routinely slaughter entire villages, counting all the old people and children they would kill as ‘casualties’. The actual Vietnamese soldier to American soldier casualty ratio was not nearly as lopsided, and quite often entire platoons of soldiers would be sent somewhere, only to be ambushed and killed outside of a few who would escape.
This is one of the reasons many Vietnam vets were so fucked up mentally coming back, was because they knew we were losing the war, that we weren’t actually killing that many Vietcong, but they would come back to the U.S. to a media what would claim that they were winning, and that they were taking extremely few casualties.
It was one of the reasons the whole MIA/POW narrative started, was to obscure the number of American casualties coming out of the war.
We decisively lost Vietnam, and the idea that we “pulled our punches” is revisionist horseshit. We killed so many civilians, corraled so many villages, and it didn’t make a single bit of difference to us winning the war.
Reminds me of German reports of counter-partisan operations “killed 1000 partisans, captured 10 rifles”.
It’s almost, almost as though they were taking military advice from former Nazi commanders… Sorry, I mean, NATO generals.
Terror bombing is absolutely fantastic at pissing the enemy off (for pretty self evident reasons), so in a way it did make a different to us winning the war.
As in: It further secured the loss of the US losing.
These are the same people who are sure Iran is losing while the USA crumbles around them
And an even larger cohort who are convinced that we could have won the Vietnam war if only the anti-war <slurs> had let amerikkka kill Vietnamese civilians for another five, ten years.
No western military has had to fight a war against anything resembling a peer-to-peer force since Vietnam or Korea, and by now everyone with experience in that sort of fighting is dead or retired. It’s all been air strikes and “counter insurgency” for the past 50 years. Walking around Iraq or Afghanistan until you get blown up by an IED doesn’t do much to teach you about drone combat or missile interception/avoidance, and leisurely bombing weddings doesn’t prepare you to actually avoid being shot down.
And on the contrary, the enemies of imperialism have had near constant experience adapting to American weapons and tactics
The only kid I knew who signed up for the army died this exact way, two weeks after he got deployed to Afghanistan
They wanted us to hold a moment of silence for him, but everyone hated him so it didn’t quite work
Lol owned, sucks to suck
He sucked and he blew
Up, that is
Gotta love self solving problems.
Yeah, he was one of those ROTC (Think Boy Scouts, but for kids who want to go to Army) guys who really wanted to kill brown people
So much so it made everyone in our magnet high school weirded out
After all, we were all supposed to be gifted kids who’d end up in the Ivys
A guy I went to high-school with… I actually like him a little, but barely know him and most of my friends hate him… just joined the military this year.
My condolences?
Both are required to win a battle. The key to victory is balance.
True, true