Until we have leadership that prioritizes winning the wars we fight, our troops will always fight with a handicap even before the enemy starts to act against our plans.
I know it is almost required to sagely note that America didn't fight a twenty-year was in Afghanistan, but fought 20 1-year wars. Troops rotated home. I don't buy this as the reason for losing the war. Note that nobody says our troops should have been sent for the duration. Or even for their full term of enlistment. Our NCOs and officers returned at higher levels of command. We certainly won on the battlefields of Iraq by 2009 using 9-15-month tours. I would really love to see an analysis of Taliban fighters. Have they been in the fight 20 years? Or did the Taliban recruit for spring offensives year after year with new foot soldiers?
Say, here's some information relevant to my position. Ahem:
Both [Russian] pilots and ground troops served in Syria for short periods, like three to six months at a time.
That extreme rotation policy didn't prevent Russia from saving the Assad regime.
Oddly, Russian troops probably didn't stay long enough to get that precious "understanding" of enemies allegedly required to beat them. Again, I call BS, which struck me based on a book I read:
[What] bothered me was just one sentence that said America lost in Vietnam because we didn't understand our enemies or the place. I think that conventional wisdom is nonsense. ...
Did America understand North African culture to (basically) win the Tripolitan War?
Did America understand Mexican culture to win the Mexican War?
Did America understand Spanish culture to win the Spanish-American War?
I could go on all the way to the 21st century, but let me just ask, did we understand Japanese culture to win the Pacific campaign in World War II?
I honestly don't think we had a clue about any of that. Heck, I don't think the Union had any more clue about the Confederate culture in our own Civil War than the Confederates had about Union culture.
You could go around the world for similar results.
Too often in modern America, those pushing for "understanding" our enemies seemingly have the goal of claiming our enemies--not America--deserve to win.
Mind you, Russia didn't recover most of Syria for Assad. But Assad's core region remains secure. That was victory enough for Russia. Sadly, Americans require more. As we wanted in Afghanistan:
I have to ask: Just what do you expect victory to look like? We invaded a Moslem tribal society that has a way to go to reach the 19th century. We don't have a functioning rule of law democracy with bike path debates there. What we do have is a place with enough local allies killing jihadis for us that is not a sanctuary to hatch plots to fly hijacked planes filled with our people into our buildings filled with our people. I don't understand how anyone can say the war was futile and that we lost.
The fact is, you win by first defeating the enemy's power and will to fight. America seems to have too many military lawyers getting in the way of victory. Our leaders put them there and gave them that authority, elevating many substitutes for victory.
And when we don't get our perfect victory we are tempted to skeddaddle right into actual defeat--while pretending we won by hanging the "Mission Accomplished" banner on the shit show of our defeat.
We don't have a troop rotation problem. Or an "understanding" problem. We have a senior leadership problem that cannot decide that winning a war is a higher priority than so many other substitutes dear to our leaders.
And is our leadership even aware they have a problem? Is the American military's ability to defend America crippled by arrogance, ignorance, and incompetence (via Instapundit)? At this point my default view is that is true until proven otherwise.
I nearly despair of our military leadership fixing itself. What level of American defeat is required to motivate them to fix this problem? And will it be too late to fix at that point?
UPDATE: Very relevant:
The officers published in the Washington Post are clueless as to why the military is now suffering its most dismal public approval ratings of the modern era — with only 45 percent of the public registering trust and confidence in their armed forces.
The nation is clearly not blaming the courageous soldiers in the enlisted ranks. But it has had enough of the Pentagon’s loud top brass who seem more interested in stirring up political divisions at home than adopting winning strategies in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, or deterring China and Russia. ...
To restore the military’s reputation, officers should eschew politics to focus on restoring strategic deterrence and military readiness. ...
But most importantly, officers should quit all their coup porn talk — either to remove a president they don’t like, or to project their own reckless, insurrectionary behavior onto their political opponents.
Do read it all.
I'd add that there is still confidence in officers below flag rank.
I've lost confidence in our top brass. Me. They lost me.
