Re:"No inventions; no innovations" A History of US Steel
by dragonwriter on Saturday December 30, 2023 @06:30PM
(#38820348)
> If you go by deaths, USA did very well in Vietnam
Yes, if war was a game where the victory condition was killing the most people... well, actually, the Khmer Rouge would have won the wars in the region, by a wide margin.
But its not, so “yeah but we killed more people than our immediate enemy” is... irrelevant, mostly. Killing people is a means, not an ends, in war (I mean, except when your war aim is extermination, but that's not the general case.)
> but since you mentioned that Iraq’s leadership remained in power after 1991 as some kind of rebuttal, I am not certain I should. Indeed, overthrowing Iraq’s government was not a war aim there.
I’m not the one that said a unifying feature of the post-WW2 wars was that the US destroyed the pre-existing government and thereby won, when that is very much nor a characteristic of those wars in general, or the specific cited examples originally provided (leaving off Iraq I, it wasn't a feature of Korea, Vietnam, or Afghanistan, specifically cited as examples upthread, either.)
Yes, if war was a game where the victory condition was killing the most people... well, actually, the Khmer Rouge would have won the wars in the region, by a wide margin.
But its not, so “yeah but we killed more people than our immediate enemy” is... irrelevant, mostly. Killing people is a means, not an ends, in war (I mean, except when your war aim is extermination, but that's not the general case.)
> but since you mentioned that Iraq’s leadership remained in power after 1991 as some kind of rebuttal, I am not certain I should. Indeed, overthrowing Iraq’s government was not a war aim there.
I’m not the one that said a unifying feature of the post-WW2 wars was that the US destroyed the pre-existing government and thereby won, when that is very much nor a characteristic of those wars in general, or the specific cited examples originally provided (leaving off Iraq I, it wasn't a feature of Korea, Vietnam, or Afghanistan, specifically cited as examples upthread, either.)