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The Ugly Truth: Defeating ISIS Will Take Decades

jet57 said:
Right. People are buying their oil and they do receive financing from rich interests. Dry that up, and they go away real easy. All we have to do is push them. I don't know why we're not.
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I didn't see anything about rich interests.
 
Oozlefinch said:
Now, we are fighting an army.

The Taliban was an army, al-Qaeda was an organization.

Remove the WTC, and the Taliban puts the death count of AQ to shame.

AQ was never able to go into villiages and round everybody up, and kill those who refused to join them. AQ never rounded up those who followed a different religion and slaughtered them wholesale. They did attacks for political purposes, they never tried to gain land or "converts".

Now the ideology can take many forms. The same ideology that is behind ISIS and the Taliban is also behind those in Indonesia and the Philippines. In some it is small groups doing attacks. In others, they are trying to create what they think of as a perfect government by overthrowing the current one. In some, they are the government itself through violence.

It is not as simple as you are making it out to be. The Philippines is a perfect example, it has been going on there for over 150 years.
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Beating the army is the easy part. Nobody on earth can stand up to a bunch of pissed off 19 year old GI's/Marines. But, beating a world wide ideology is another story, especially with the new brand of radicalism. And yes........... It really is that simple.
 
The Ugly Truth: Defeating ISIS Will Take Decades
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in that case, Saudi Arabia had better get to work.
 
RetiredUSN said:
Beating the army is the easy part. Nobody on earth can stand up to a bunch of pissed off 19 year old GI's/Marines. But, beating a world wide ideology is another story, especially with the new brand of radicalism. And yes........... It really is that simple.
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*scratches head*

War is less a military issue then a political one. And the group in charge after the bullets stop flying has little to do with who wins the wars.

You will never beat an idea. But you can show an idea to the world as being poison, and serve those up as an example by smashing them down by force if needed.

Take National Socialism. By itself, not a bad form of government. Heck, we are still allies with at least one National Socialist government that I am aware of. But it is the excesses in it (NSDAP) that caused problems, so they were largely crushed out of existance.

Easy to say nobody can stand up to "a bunch of pissed off 19 year old GI's/Marines". How much good did that do in South Vietnam? Or in Iraq after we left? Or in Afghanistan now?

You are confusing winning battles and winning the peace. Militarily, we are awesome at winning battles. Politically, we have much less luck in the last 50 years in winning the peace.
 
Oozlefinch said:
*scratches head*

War is less a military issue then a political one. And the group in charge after the bullets stop flying has little to do with who wins the wars.

You will never beat an idea. But you can show an idea to the world as being poison, and serve those up as an example by smashing them down by force if needed.

Take National Socialism. By itself, not a bad form of government. Heck, we are still allies with at least one National Socialist government that I am aware of. But it is the excesses in it (NSDAP) that caused problems, so they were largely crushed out of existance.

Easy to say nobody can stand up to "a bunch of pissed off 19 year old GI's/Marines". How much good did that do in South Vietnam? Or in Iraq after we left? Or in Afghanistan now?

You are confusing winning battles and winning the peace. Militarily, we are awesome at winning battles. Politically, we have much less luck in the last 50 years in winning the peace.
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No............you are confused. We won every battle in Vietnam. We won every battle in Iraq. We won every battle in Afghanistan. You win peace by killing enough of the enemy to the point of surrender. Governments create wars, not the military. The military saves their asses when they make stupid decisions to go to war. The politicians only pretend feel bad when they see the body count, and need a way to wiggle out of their decisions.
 
RetiredUSN said:
No............you are confused. We won every battle in Vietnam. We won every battle in Iraq. We won every battle in Afghanistan. You win peace by killing enough of the enemy to the point of surrender. Governments create wars, not the military. The military saves their asses when they make stupid decisions to go to war. The politicians only pretend feel bad when they see the body count, and need a way to wiggle out of their decisions.
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so how do you win against someone who with no concept of surrender or negotiating and has nothing to lose?
 
Oozlefinch said:
So you think his "unawarranted influence" is a call for the destruction of the organizations?
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You admit that you were wrong then. Fine.

Who said destroy the military industrial? Eisenhower? No. Me? No. We have to marginalize their influence. That's what Eisenhower was talking about. THEY sell to the pentagon. Have you seen the military budget lately? Are you concerned abut government spending? I am.

And you claim to be a "centrist"? Sorry, I do not take radicals seriously. Especially radicals who try to claim they are mainstream.
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"Radical" (chuckle)

Centrist, yes.
 
RetiredUSN said:
Vietnam taught us nothing.

We continue into wars without understanding the mindset of the people we are going up against.

People and cultures that are willing to sacrifice their own children are just as powerful as a any army.

Vietnam is almost kids school compared to what we are facing now. I'm not trying to be being disrespectful to my "Nam" brethren, but the conflict there was contained within a geographical area. We are now fighting a righteous ideology spread across the globe.
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What Vietnam showed is that elements in this country are willing to waste everything on nothing.

Check Iraq...
 
jet57 said:
(chuckle)

It was last year. ISIS stated before last Thursday ya'know.
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The article is from 2014, and references to wealthy donors put them all in the past even then. I don't claim that no wealthy Arab ever helped ISIS, but the evidence is clear that such support is no longer significant.
 
Yesterday I watched a news piece on the continent of Africa and the majority of its nations are in chaos with radical Islam taking over easily.
 
beerftw said:
Yes germany did get harder overall, but the point was the germans used the bombings to destroy infrastructure and demoralize the british into surrendering, which failed. But yes boots on the ground works twofold, it helps eliminate targets with minimal collateral damage, and gives a presence for locals opposed to terrorism to oppose it without fearing for their lives.
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What happens when the "boots on the ground" guys conduct terrorist operations, when they become the terrorists themselves? Who do the locals have to turn to when that happens?
 
Thoreau72 said:
What happens when the "boots on the ground" guys conduct terrorist operations, when they become the terrorists themselves? Who do the locals have to turn to when that happens?
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The other forces around, which may be the forces we would be fighting. Boots on ground s vastly more effective than just airstrikes, while airstrikes aid a war effort they do not win it. Boots on ground would only work if civilian casualties were minimized to unnavoidable circumstances.

The subject you bring up is pretty much what america did before the surge in iraq. During the surge we employed the new coin strategy, and changed roe to minimize collateral damage. Soldiers were also educated on how terrorists use propoganda to recruit more people, how guns a blazing was counter productive, and how not being stupid and gaining the confidence of the local elders could help war efforts.


That strategy worked quite well and was why the surge was a success, because it not only increased military force, but it changed how it used it tailored to modern wars. The end problem became that the succesful strategy was pretty much abandoned, by using drone strikes and other air strikes to try to solve a problem. It became much worse when the us govt went into proxy wars by funding, aiding, or promoting the overthrow of different govts in the middle east.


Syria and libya are both complete wrecks after us intervention, and heavily destabilized the region. The us outside of destabilizing stable govts has also continued to use airstrikes in other countries sovereign space, causing heavy collateral damage. To people here we think oh we toppled a dictator or oh we just killed terrorist leader xyz. To people in those countries, they see their country in complete ruin, and they don't exactly cheer when we bomb a building killing numerous of their friends and family to kill a single guy, they could probably care less about whether that terrorist leader lived or died, but they do care about their friends and family killed to get a single or a few guys.
 
Wars brought under fraud are never good wars. Some treaties call it 'military aggression', and it's illegal.
 
jet57 said:
I'm talking abut the military industrial complex. Dwight Eisenhower warned US about those guys, and here we are: up to our eyeballs in never ending war with the complex making billions.
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The private sector companies don't decide when or where to go to war. They simply provide the equipment to fight the wars. Government goes to war, not Lockheed Martin.
 
fmw said:
The private sector companies don't decide when or where to go to war. They simply provide the equipment to fight the wars. Government goes to war, not Lockheed Martin.
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I don't remember saying that they did: perhaps you can help me out there... They are an industry that pushes weapons to make it easy to winwars. And some stupid person decides to invade a place like Grenada... or Iraq, the military industrial complex makes out like bandits and they lobby...
 
jet57 said:
I don't remember saying that they did: perhaps you can help me out there... They are an industry that pushes weapons to make it easy to winwars. And some stupid person decides to invade a place like Grenada... or Iraq, the military industrial complex makes out like bandits and they lobby...
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So you have a government that needs equipment from manufacturers who are in the business of making profits. Are you suggesting we move to a different system?
 
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