RE: Minimalist will love this one...
September 25, 2014 at 5:45 pm
(This post was last modified: September 25, 2014 at 6:04 pm by Anomalocaris.)
(September 25, 2014 at 2:25 pm)Minimalist Wrote: Always remember:
Quote:Nervos belli, pecuniam.
-Marcus Tullius Cicero
"The sinews of war is unlimited money."
We spend $1,000,000 per man to equip, pay and train a soldier. Meanwhile they hand some fuckhead a garage door opener and tell him to press it when one of our super expensive vehicles goes by.
You can't win that.
Don't forget in the early days of the war, we outnumbered the insurgency by 10 to 1. If we had handled the initial phase of occupation right, the number of insurgents should go down from there, not up. We squandered the chance.
Even today, if we mount a real military operation against ISIS, we would still easily outnumber them 10 to 1.
Basically, in most real counter insurgency opeartions, soldiers are not really there mainly to hunt down the insurgency. They are mainly there to take casualties while keeping civilians from being coerced by the insurgency. If they kill insurgents, that's just a bonus, but it won't be decisive.
If you can keep the insurgency from coercing the civilians, and provide the civilians with an enlightened administration, and keep the civilians from each other's throats, the insurgency will wither. Else you will lose.
It's that simple.
