Once again, “but not me personally” doesn’t actually change the narrative that has been throughly established, especially since you haven’t actually said anything against said narrative.
All you've really done is complain about a narrative you don't think is accurate using poor, deterministic language.
According to the West the Ukrainians are far superior to the Russians, yes. Yet the Ukrainians are the ones who keep losing major battles.
You cite two Russian victories that were separated by a year. Russia did not win these battles through superior skill-at-arms, they won because they had more men and manpower to throw at them then Ukraine.
Is that discussing the same operations I already pointed out? Because A) the source I provided displays a very different picture
It's in reference to the entirety of Iraqs' final offensive operations.
And your source doesn't back up what you're claiming much at all; there is a world of difference between doing a good job planning an operation and actually executing it. You claimed explicitly "the performance of the Iraqi military as a whole proved substantially better than it had been during the earlier phases of the war", and that is demonstrably not true.
Iraqi final offensives were well planned; that doesn't change the fact that when they actually pulled them off, Iraqi forces were still making a host of basic tactical errors and were only succeeding because they had overwhelming advantages in firepower and armor. As Pollack points out, when it came to the actual performance of Iraqi soldiers and formations (what you included "as a whole"), there was no real improvement from 1980 to 1988.
You are claiming "well they worked, so Iraq must have been good", is a logical fallacy. As Pollack points out, Iraq succeeded in spite of the fact that their forces remained poorly skilled at executing complex maneuvers, because they had overwhelming firepower at their disposal, not because their forces got better at pulling off combines arms operations. As Pollack mentioned, whenever the Iraqis encountered something "offscript", all that planning went out the window and Iraqi forces could only flail about, lacking the skill necessary to seize the initiative.
It also doesn’t contradict my statement that the Iraqis demonstrated skill in the use of chemical weapons.
Using a lot of posion gas on the enemy is not a good mark of conventional capability, so citing it is not really proving your argument especially when Iraq was reliant on US provided intel to guide their usage of it.
The US engaged in large scale anti-partisan operations in both northern Mexico and across much of the Caribbean and Central America, and struggled immensely.
When?
Political and military will are inherently connected.
Not in the way you are trying to present them. That the US lost the political will to maintain a peacekeeping mission in Somalia has little resemblance to the Ukraine war at all. This whole line of argument for you is nonsensical; we are talking about a single battle where Russia allegedly lost 16,000 KIA over the course of ~four months, to two separate wars America waged for the better part of two decades, during which a global financial crisis developed, four Presidential Administrations came and went, along with all the political changes and upheaval that came with it. They are apples and oranges.
