Nice way of putting it. The US hasn't lost a war since Georgie Custer went off a joyride in 1876.
Ukraine updates
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Vietnam was 100% a loss. But it was a chance for lessons learned, and lessons were definitely learned. There's a reason Kuwait and Iraq were a no-holds-barred blitz where enemy positions had so much ordinance dropped on them the Iraqi soldiers were stiff as Terra Cotta Warriors and fighting ineffective of shell shock by the time the infantry made it to them.
The US operational art in Vietnam was such a mess. Most of NATO had moved to maneuver by then, but the US was slow to adopt it fully so they were doing this weird mix of maneuver making effective use of motorized and airmobile, but still clinging to limited, creeping war dictated by attrition. In the world of asymmetric warfare, like they had in Vietnam, that just didn't work as well as it did in WWII against an entrenched, conventional military.
Actually, I like Doc's turn of phrase. If the US had wanted to blow even more money and political cred on Vietnam, they could be fighting there to this day. And they probably would be, which is why it was so smart to quit and walk away.
Kuwait and both Iraqs were desert blitzes with overwhelming firepower against inferior conventional forces. VN wasn't. You can't do George Patton shit in the middle of a jungle against an enemy which just melts away into the trees when your armour shows up.
Nah, I'm just doing the same, dumb shtick I used when I called Notty "Nottiboyski".@ Addyovsky!!!
(You must have been a brutal name caller in grade school!)
Russia is pronounced in Russian as 'Russeeeeaaaaaaarghhhhhhhhhhh.......' (falling down a cliff sound) because of this war.
I'll see myself out.
I'll see myself out.
The War in Ukraine Was Provoked
The Biden administration’s insistence on NATO enlargement has made Ukraine a victim of misconceived and unachievable U.S. military aspirations, writes Jeffrey D. Sachs. By Jeffrey D. Sachs Common Dreams George Orwell wrote in 1984 that "Who controls the past controls the future: wh
consortiumnews.com
WEDNESDAY, MAY 24, 2023 - 08:50 PM
Authored by Jeffrey D. Sachs via Consortium News,
George Orwell wrote in 1984 that “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” Governments work relentlessly to distort public perceptions of the past. Regarding the Ukraine War, the Biden administration has repeatedly and falsely claimed that the Ukraine War started with an unprovoked attack by Russia on Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022.
In fact, the war was provoked by the U.S. in ways that leading U.S. diplomats anticipated for decades in the lead-up to the war, meaning that the war could have been avoided and should now be stopped through negotiations.
Recognizing that the war was provoked helps us to understand how to stop it. It doesn’t justify Russia’s invasion. A far better approach for Russia might have been to step up diplomacy with Europe and with the non-Western world to explain and oppose U.S. militarism and unilateralism.
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, left, and Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky in Kiev, Oct. 31, 2019. (NATO, CC)
In fact, the relentless U.S. push to expand NATO is widely opposed throughout the world, so Russian diplomacy rather than war would likely have been effective.
Two Main Provocations
The Biden team uses the word “unprovoked” incessantly, most recently in Biden’s major speech on the first-year anniversary of the war, in a recent NATO statement, and in the most recent G7 statement.
Mainstream media friendly to Biden simply parrot the White House. The New York Times is the lead culprit, describing the invasion as “unprovoked” no fewer than 26 times, in five editorials, 14 opinion columns by NYT writers, and seven guest op-eds.
There were in fact two main U.S. provocations.
The first was the U.S. intention to expand NATO to Ukraine and Georgia in order to surround Russia in the Black Sea region by NATO countries (Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria Turkey, and Georgia, in counterclockwise order).
The second was the U.S. role in installing a Russophobic regime in Ukraine by the violent overthrow of Ukraine’s pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych, in February 2014. The shooting war in Ukraine began with Yanukovych’s overthrow nine years ago, not in February 2022 as the U.S. government, NATO, and the G7 leaders would have us believe.
Biden and his foreign policy team refuse to discuss these roots of the war. To recognize them would undermine the administration in three ways.
First, it would expose how the war could have been avoided, or stopped early, sparing Ukraine its current devastation and the U.S. more than $100 billion in outlays to date.
Second, it would expose Biden’s personal role in the war as a participant in the overthrow of Yanukovych, and before that as a staunch backer of the military-industrial complex and very early advocate of NATO enlargement.
Third, it would push Biden to the negotiating table, undermining the administration’s continued push for NATO expansion.
Check the Archives
The archives show irrefutably that the U.S. and German governments repeatedly promised to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not move “one inch eastward” when the Soviet Union disbanded the Warsaw Pact military alliance.
Nonetheless, U.S. planning for NATO expansion began early in the 1990s, well before Vladimir Putin was Russia’s president. In 1997, national security expert Zbigniew Brzezinski spelled out the NATO expansion timeline with remarkable precision.
U.S. diplomats and Ukraine’s own leaders knew well that NATO enlargement could lead to war. The U.S. scholar-statesman George Kennan called NATO enlargement a “fateful error,” writing in The New York Times that,
President Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Defense William Perry considered resigning in protest against NATO enlargement. In reminiscing about this crucial moment in the mid-1990s, Perry said the following in 2016:
In 1998, William Burns, then the U.S. ambassador to Russia and now the C.I.A. director, sent a cable to Washington warning at length of grave risks of NATO enlargement:
Ukraine’s leaders knew clearly that pressing for NATO enlargement to Ukraine would mean war. Former Zelensky adviser Oleksiy Arestovych declared in a 2019 interview “that our price for joining NATO is a big war with Russia.”
During 2010-2013, Yanukovych pushed neutrality, in line with Ukrainian public opinion. The U.S. worked covertly to overthrow Yanukovych, as captured vividly in the tape of then U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt planning the post-Yanukovych government weeks before the violent overthrow of Yanukovych.
Nuland makes clear on the call that she was coordinating closely with then Vice President Biden and his national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, the same Biden-Nuland-Sullivan team now at the center of U.S. policy vis-à-vis Ukraine.
Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and Secretary of State Antony Blinken meeting with members of Ukraine’s Rada in Kiev, May 6, 2021. (State Department/Ron Przysucha)
After Yanukovych’s overthrow, the war broke out in the Donbass, while Russia claimed Crimea. The new Ukrainian government appealed for NATO membership, and the U.S. armed and helped restructure the Ukrainian army to make it interoperable with NATO. In 2021, NATO and the Biden administration strongly recommitted to Ukraine’s future in NATO.
In the immediate lead-up to Russia’s invasion, NATO enlargement was center stage. Putin’s draft NATO-Russia Treaty (Dec. 17, 2021) called for a halt to NATO enlargement. Russia’s leaders put NATO enlargement as the cause of war in Russia’s National Security Council meeting on Feb. 21, 2022. In his address to the nation that day, Putin declared NATO enlargement to be a central reason for the invasion.
Historian Geoffrey Roberts recently wrote:
In March 2022, Russia and Ukraine reported progress towards a quick negotiated end to the war based on Ukraine’s neutrality. According to Naftali Bennett, former prime minister of Israel, who was a mediator, an agreement was close to being reached before the U.S., U.K. and France blocked it.
While the Biden administration declares Russia’s invasion to be unprovoked, Russia pursued diplomatic options in 2021 to avoid war, while Biden rejected diplomacy, insisting that Russia had no say whatsoever on the question of NATO enlargement. And Russia pushed diplomacy in March 2022, while the Biden team again blocked a diplomatic end to the war.
By recognizing that the question of NATO enlargement is at the center of this war, we understand why U.S. weaponry will not end this war. Russia will escalate as necessary to prevent NATO enlargement to Ukraine. The key to peace in Ukraine is through negotiations based on Ukraine’s neutrality and NATO non-enlargement.
The Biden administration’s insistence on NATO enlargement to Ukraine has made Ukraine a victim of misconceived and unachievable U.S. military aspirations. It’s time for the provocations to stop, and for negotiations to restore peace to Ukraine.
Special military operations or non consensual live fire exercises, next on Gerardo.
Sure if you go back 200 years* the French were stronk, but that's no fun. A lot more fun making fun of cheese eating surrender monkeys.
*yea yea Crimea and colonial actions but still.
How many times have you taken the effort to look up his sources to point out they are either wackjobs, have a history of being extremely wrong on the topic or both.
Has he ever once retracted a statement because of this.
They lost the battle, they won the war. The Americans have lost many battles.
Also, I read it on some youtube comment. I sadly don't have an original source if one exists. But it ain't mine.
The Americans crushed the VC, secured much of the country signed a treaty with North Vietnam and went home. NV then figured they would try their luck and by then the Americans lost interest. It wasn't guys in slippers and PJs that went into Saigon, most of those were dead, it was NVA tanks. They had their victory but couldn't be bothered to make it stick.
Tet went so badly for the VC that some thought it was a North Vietnam plot to get rid of potential trouble makers.
Although I would agree if someone was to wonder if the Americans had put on of McNamara's Morons in charge at times
Project 100,000 - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
One of the Russian pro war Milbloggers was saying out of 50K convicts, 10K were claimed dead, 26K were sent home, which leaves 14K unaccounted for. He assumes most of those are dead also, maybe another 10K [maybe they had not done their 6 months but I guess the mill blogger would know if they had or had not.
20K among the criminals, and if he understated that, another 20K among the professionals, plus whatever the Russians lost.
So let me get this straight .....McGregor is a neo fascist shit-weasel.
On the "underclass" and slavery
In a 2013 radio appearance, Macgregor spoke of an "entitled" "underclass" of people that were concentrated in "large urban areas", and the threat they posed.
In 2019, he argued for the myth that there were more White, mostly Irish "slaves" than African slaves in America in the late 1700s.[34]
On the Kosovo War
In 2014, Macgregor went on Russian state-owned RT to express his opposition to U.S. intervention in the Kosovo War.[26] He described the results of US intervention in Kosovo as to "put, essentially, a Muslim drug mafia in charge of that country".[3]
On NATO
In a 2016 presentation to military students, Macgregor said that "old alliances like NATO may vanish", arguing that it is "time to reexamine U.S. investment in 'allies' that are doing too little to secure their own sovereign interests" and that the "Cold War ended 27 years ago".[41]
On immigration
In 2020, CNN reviewed his public commentary and
In 2019, on the Conservative Commandos radio show, Macgregor said that George Soros was financing the transportation of foreigners to the United States to destroy American culture:
He made similar claims about Soros on Lou Dobbs' Fox show in December 2019.[22] He has described Muslim migrants in Europe as "unwanted invaders", arriving "with the goal of eventually turning Europe into an Islamic state".[34] In April 2021 on Frank Morano's radio show, Macgregor blamed the Democratic Party for immigration:
These views were described by MSNBC, Media Matters for America, The Insider and Newsweek as a version of Great Replacement Theory.[43][44][45][46]
Douglas Macgregor - Wikipedia
..... are you presenting a forceful argument that Mash Brains Magoo has all the bona fides to be DJT's next NSA, Sec. of Def., Chairman of JCS and Sec. of State?
Like minded idiot savants and stable geniuses that would melt the most powerful AI powered MRI mind reading algorithms?
Sure. But they left without accomplishing any objectives. That's a loss.
That was my point. Vietnam was a test of a new American theory: limited warfare. A hybrid maneuver/attrition strategy. It failed, they lost, but they learned from it. Even against a conventional army it fails. That was played out in wargames. As an operational art, it's an unmitigated disaster.
You are incorrect. You might be immune to his mom because of what he says ... Charisma is the Bread and butter Of con men.
They were never defeated on the battlefield.
What the war hawks really wanted to do was nuke Hanoi. If the US wanted, it could have totally destroyed NVN the way a 240 lb steroid psycho gym rat asshole beats a 100 lb 12 year old kid to death over a stolen candy bar.
I know. They really haven't lost any wars - mainly because they were always a lot bigger than their opponents. Custer was the best I could come up with.
Depends what the objective is. In Kuwait the objective was to eject Iraq and restore the local government. Easy. In Vietnam, Korea, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Somalia, Lebanon, not so easy. All losses according to objectives(though you can argue Korea).
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