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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bilow who wrote (191714)	7/15/2006 2:45:26 AM
From: Hawkmoon	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 281500

Our land battles in WW2 were piddly. Battle of the Bulge had something less than 200,000 casualties, total for both sides, counting wounded. At the battle of Stalingrad, there were a total of 1,600,000 casualties, 8x larger. Geezus.. we had 12 Million men and women in uniform!!! And not all of them were sailors or airmen.. Maybe you need to take some time and read "Citizen Soldiers" or "Closing with the Enemy" and ascertain for yourself just how many casualties we took in our infantry.. Yeah.. we didn't lose as many men as the Russians, but then gain we weren't into using human wave assaults or "penal companies". Hell, the Russians couldn't normally advance any further than a full tank of gas, because they didn't have the necessary logistics to support their attacks. As for the Pacific being a Naval Battle, of course the US had to control the seas.. just like we needed to control any other lines of communications in our battles on land. But the goal was not merely to destroy the Japanese Navy.. It was to hop from island to island so that we could be in a position to invade the Japanese homeland. And that required infantry and armor.. Hawk

To: Bilow who wrote (191714)	7/15/2006 11:10:11 AM
From: h0db	Respond to of 281500

Carl, One misperception about Vietnam is that we could have won with today's weapons. I think this ignores the reasons why we lost--it had little or nothing do with with our ability to kill Vietnamese. Assuming the same political realities and assumptions of the 1960s-70s, you could take all of the PGMs, LACMs, JDAMs, JSTARS, AWACS, etc, put them in Mr. Peabody's "Way Back" machine... and we still lose that war. Just as we are losing the war in Iraq. Today, US forces in Iraq have one primary mission-- don't get killed,aka "force protection." That means that job #1 for US forces is not to stop the sectarian violence--US troops have done nothing even when militias cordon off neighborhoods for hours and shoot civilians in the head for having the wrong first name. They are there simply to be there, hunkered down, trying not to become casualties in the civil war.