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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Brumar89 who wrote (712104)	4/26/2013 10:36:40 PM
From: Bilow	Respond to of 1571928

Hi Brumar89; Re African armies beating "white" armies. Of course the early history of our country involved landing troops in Africa "shores of Tripoli" and all that. At that time the north Aricans were pretty much ignored by Europe. Advantages in European technology led to the colonization of all of Africa. For example the French took over Algeria in 1830 and decided it was a part of France, to be defended to the last man. French settlers moved to Algeria. So long as military technology favored Europe they maintained these colonies. Typical was the poem, "we have got, the Maxim gun and they have not". The end was brought about by a reduction in cost of machine guns, or more accurately, assault rifles. In short, the AK-47 liberated Africa. It's on the flag of Mozambique, coat of arms of Zimbabwe and East Timor and used to be on Burkina Faso's. By the way, it's not well known outside of gun lover circles, but the Russian inventor of the AK-47, Mikhail Kalashnikov, was a buddy of Eugene Stoner, the American inventor of the M-16. The continent became independent primarily through a series of wars fought between insurgents and European armies. France lost Algeria as a result of the "Algerian War" which was fought (mostly) between the Armée de Libération Nationale and the French Army. France took 25,000 dead and 65,000 wounded before giving in to a political solution. I don't know what the population of France was back then, but as of now, the US is 5x larger so I'm guessing this is around 2x our losses in Vietnam, on a per capita basis. By the way, did you know that the US is the 3rd most populous country in the world after China and India? I think of us as a lot smaller.) Most of the real military disasters in world history began with somebody underestimating another country's military power. I don't think it's a good idea to underestimate the power of African military forces. We can easily beat them in standard combat, but as far as holding territory we do not have the public willpower needed to accept the resulting casualties. When what's his name said the US should avoid land wars in Asia he should have included Africa too. Our last big land war in Europe was fortunate in that we had some allies that took most of the casualties (though I doubt they would have won without our industrial support). -- Carl P.S. en.wikipedia.org