The American Way of War

War may be thought of in two ways. First, as a football game between armies, in which the function of the citizenry is to cheer for the home team. In football, success is measured in points scored, yardage gained, the brilliance of play, and time of possession. In war as football, it battles won, enemies killed, territory conquered. The crucial goal is to defeat the other side’s armed forces. Doing so constitutes victory.

To one who sees the war in this way, as militaries invariably do, America will always come out ahead on points since we fight only countries hopelessly inferior in military terms. In Vietnam, Laos, Iraq, and Afghanistan the US killed vastly more people than it suffered dead, won almost all battles by overwhelming material  superiority, and easily captured any territory it chose.

American public–whether rightly or wrongly doesn’t matter at all–that the US was not winning and couldn’t win.

America declared victory and left–the first part of what the North wanted. In 1975 when Ban Me Thuot fell and the NVA rolled South, the more warlike in America wanted to send the Air Force to save the South and said that the US had weakened its allies by not supplying them with fuel and so on. Some said that the Democrats in Congress were treasonous and should be tried. As you like. But the public was so sick of that war than any attempt to restart it was going to have Congressmen hanging from lamp posts.

The strategy of the North, which might be regarded as a form of psywar, had worked.

Can America be defeated this way again? Unlikely. The all-voluntary military means that body bags will contain only elements of society that the ruling classes don’t care about. Wars now chiefly involve bombing enemies who have no way of fighting back. Reliance on drones means no casualties at all, and the use of robots in ground combat, long a pipe dream, is nearing reality. The media are under control. America still loses its wars in the sense of not getting what it wants, but the public doesn’t care and you cannot sap a drone’s will. Here is the lesson of Vietnam.

The post The American Way of War appeared first on LewRockwell.