In WW2 thousands of troops could die in a single day and we wouldn't know their names until months or years later. Today a single troop dies and it is the first story on the national news. Millions of civilians also died, just the amount of soldier deaths would be the equivalent of 2-3 September 11s (worldwide) every day for a period of 6 years.
So we say "war" but modern conflicts are absolutely nothing compared to what has happened historically. Even though these new "wars" don't seem to have the same definitive results, the alternative could be much, much worse. We're much better off with the bomb critical sites, apply sanctions and political pressure methods vs. the send entire generations off to die methods of old.
Russia's goal is direct annexation of about quarter of the Ukrainian territory and installing a lifelong puppet regime to control the other three quarters. Ukrainians stand to lose not just their voice and any semblance of economic prosperity, but also their very identity.
With the exception of extreme cases like Gaza, it doesn't get more binary than that.
I am from Ukraine, been stateside since the late '80s, but visited Kiyv and my hometown of Odessa once a decade ago. I am far removed. So many perished on both sides, but we can do nothing but stand by. Can't ask Ukraine to surrender, can't let Russia to get away with this, there is no RTB while VP is running the theater, while the dead are piling up. It's a forever war at this point. Tell me it's not and there is something to look forward to. My spouse is from Russia and can't even visit her homeland to see her aging parents. Semi-annual meetups in Turkey or the UAE, but nobody's getting younger.
From Ukraine's perspective it's existential for sure. Russia however, just revises its objectives every few months according to how well/badly its prospects on the battlefield are looking.
Isn't it more that they started changing objectives because their original objectives turned out to be unattainable?
I also think that for Putin it is pretty existential. Otherwise, they would have negotiated a temporary deal, took the pretty large amount of land that they had taken at the end of 2022. Work on another 'project' like Georgia for a few years, do a lot of disinformation campaigns in Europe in the meanwhile and then revisit Ukraine later. That would have a lot of benefits, like no reaming of Europe, no development of Ukraine's capabilities (resulting in a drastic drop in refinement capabilities), etc.
But he couldn't. It would make him look weak and would make him vulnerable to a coup. Continuing is the only way for him.
Russia's goals have far evolved over the course of the war, and started out comically ridiculous, prompting a great many people to ask questions about the information "bubble" around Putin. Over the past year, I believe most people would agree Russia has lost a LOT of ground when it comes to their war aims, even if not that much territory.
2014: seize Crimea (success, although it no longer serves any purpose) and Sevastopol (total failure, Sevastopol can no longer serve the Russian black sea fleet, and when it comes to the other goal: keep NATO out of the black sea, it's an even bigger failure. Russia has lost control of the skies above the black sea completely and are losing control over the sea of Azov, by withdrawing air defenses. Now go look on the map where the sea of Azov is to see the magnitude of this failure), prevent Ukraine from approaching NATO and EU (complete failure is putting it very mildly), keep Ukraine unstable (succeeded, until Euromaidan revolution, ie. actually this is a failure)
2022: maintain control over Crimea (looks to be failing, as in Ukraine still controls Crimea's water supply), build a land bridge to Crimea (successfull, except that they can't use their land bridge for anything), seize control over Ukraine's government ("denazify" Ukraine), demilitarize Ukraine (as in Ukraine accepts no to have an army. Obviously total and complete failure), and prevent Ukraine and others from coming closer to NATO (obviously total failure, and not just in Ukraine)
In June 2026, ie. about 4 weeks ago, Russia once again confirmed these goals.
Oh and they were going to do this in 3 days. Then in 3 weeks. Then in 2 months. Then they stopped making predictions. Today is day 1608 of their 3-day attempt.
‘Russia’ is not a human subject and can say nothing, and this is obvious, so the question is framed with propagandistic intent.
The judgment was the basis of the invasion. Lukashenko and state TV did however say it; more interestingly the Biden administration - which had access to internal discussion and wrongly credited the cognition and rationality of Russian bureaucrats - also/ affirmed it.
In fact victory was assumed to have happened instantly: the famous widely mocked hundreds of miles of stalled trucks in the opening week contained //no military equipment//: it was all police equipment for managing recalcitrants in Kiev. Why? Because the war was ‘always already’ won; it was just a question of taking possession. The basic structure they falsely thought they had imposed everywhere did more or less materialize and work in the SE
It may not be a lot of dying at once, but some modern wars are rivaling these catastrophic wars of old in casualties.
By some counts there have already been at least a million casualties in the Ukraine war, and in Gaza there is probably 100,000 casualties now (military + civilian). And, the conflicts in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo over the decades have produced about 5–5.4 million casualties, although accumulated over decades rather than in a single war.
So modern conflicts may be lower intensity and lest existential, but they can be every bit as deadly.
For Ukraine it's very much an existential war. If they lose, Ukraine will cease to exist. The only way of winning is, well, winning this war. It is also very much a real war, with hundreds of thousands of deaths on both sides, a true massacre not seen in Europe since WW2.
Trumps stupid war on Iran on the other hand is really just some air strikes, and Iran can win by just not losing, which is easy, because the US will not invade.
It's interesting how casually we replace concern for the population with concern for the political entity. No, the Ukrainian identity will not cease to exist with the replacement of the political entity.
What Russia has done in the past is take people who want to hold onto their old national identity and send them to labor camps far away where most will die, and migrate Russians to the areas so as generations go by Ukrainian identity would be fully gone.
Ask Ukrainians what they think about that. Putin made it more than clear that he wants to erase the Ukrainian identity. [1] In this case, the political entity of Ukraine represents the Ukrainian population, which wants to be free, democratic, Europe-oriented, and last but not least, never ever be under Russian dictatorship again.
Russias attitude towards Ukraine has turned borderline genocidal since the start of this war.
Do you have a source for this? The closest thing I've heard of was vague reports of children being shipped to Russia. I'm not denying it has ever happened, but the question is what is the motivation, how systematic is it, etc.
I mean Russia definitely keeps losing very many soldiers every day, I don't think that is comparable at all. It's completely different from US vs Iran.
Rome lost loads of soldiers in the Germanic wars too. The parallel is that these wars are too expensive (for a non-existential conflict) to take to fulfilment, but also can't easily be disengaged from.
I guess it depends on what you mean by "easily", but Putin could very much just say "fuck this" and turn off the war machine in one day and it's not at all clear to me that there would be much consequential blowback other than the personal humiliation of one man.
Would other countries now decide to attack Russia? Of course not. Would the oligarchs flip out and have him assassinated? No. Would the West disassemble the sanctioning apparatus? Eventually.
But the real downside is just simple humiliation and to prevent that, they will continue sacrificing young men.
I mean I guess I disagree with the fact that it has any truth about being a "special military operation", when it is really an invasion where a country is trying to gain territory using ground forces etc. It's an invasion and a war, they wanted the binary outcome, they just didn't expect the opponent to push back so strongly.
The only sources I can find for that are all Russian. Wikipedia (Which I assume you will dismiss out of hand) says it's complicated to determine at best, as they both hide information and boost propaganda. At least don't state it as fact. No one actually knows, which is why citing sources is helpful so that weight can be added.
Not sure if the numbers are correct, but it looks like the number of Russians killed in Ukraine is about the same as the number of Americans killed in WW2. Does it matter if the state uses a carrot or stick to send a generation off to die?
These may be rookie numbers for Russia, but it's still significant.
Well there is Russian and then there is Russian. The elites in Moscow and St. Petersburg don't really regard people from the outer provinces as fully Russian, especially not the ethnic minority groups. They're expendable. Most of the casualties have come from those areas so far but they're starting to run out of potential recruits. If the authorities start conscripting men from the core cities and feeding them into the meat grinder then internal dissent will likely increase.
Correct. Conscription in Russia largely happens to rural people, ethnic minorities and convicts. Russia is the way it is because a large enough number of ethnic Russian middle class urbanites don't give a fuck about anything, and Putin knows the moment he starts drafting them he turns them into anti war activists.
Really, now? What national news do you watch? I have literally never seen current/breaking news stories about the death of American troops in action. It seems literally the most silent thing going on. I really don't know--are casualty numbers reported on a regular basis, from the "front"?
I would sometimes, after the fact, learn of repatriation flights or interment ceremonies for fallen soldiers. But only on a sporadic basis. Literally, I think I would be familiar with them by now, since Operation Desert Storm or so. This is not something they put on the news. I think that a comparison of casualties from allied and belligerent troops would be something to report, but if they do, it's just sort of being slotted into some Wikipedia article somewhere, I guess.
The #2 headline on nytimes.com literally right now is "Pentagon Identifies Two U.S. Troops Killed in Jordan". (Same slot for nbcnews.com; https://www.bbc.com/news/us-canada currently has "US soldier killed and one injured after Iranian attack in Iraq" as the top slot.)
Yesterday that NYT home page featured a cell phone video of the strike as the main story.
Right now, the front page of CNN's web site in the US has as the primary headline "Third US service member killed as US ramps up strikes on Iran"[1]. The secondary headline has the names of two of them.[2]
I’m fairly surprised you are not seeing them. As a test, I checked for US servicemember deaths in the Middle East in July 2026 and checked against my own recall from casual news consumption.
I knew of the helicopter
crash (1) and missile attack (2). I did not know of the EOD accident (1) this weekend. So, 3 of 4 I knew about without any particularly directed effort to follow it (and the 4th, I’m sure I’ll see reporting about during the week but wasn’t consuming much content of any type over the weekend).
>> Really, now? What national news do you watch? I have literally never seen current/breaking news stories about the death of American troops in action.
It happened about three days ago. I'm not even in the US and it was a top headline here.
To "win" a war you must have specific and measurable goals. If your politicians start a war but cannot articulate such goals, you're going to lose. They'll assure you they will win, but they've already lost. They are bad at their jobs, why did you hire these morons?
I can't believe I had to scroll down to see this. Victory always flows down; you can have the most badass of technical equipment or cunning tactical victories in the field, then still quite enthusiastically lose the war, due to bad strategy or even the original political goals of conflict.
Or because the political goals were impossible or - almost breathtaking that this state can even exist - because the goals are entirely absent. Incidentally, having a "rotating roster" of different political goals probably counts as something worse than "absent", due to the illusory impression that it gives of "someone deciding something".
Has anyone does analysis on Home vs Away wars ? Russia is in a Home war. Similarly US is in Away war. Also being a land power vs sea power. US is a sea power vs Iran being a land power.
The goal is to sell weapons during the war; then afterwards, sell loans to rebuild what the weapons have destroyed... And sometimes it's also to control access to natural resources or trading routes. They don't care who it is who facilitates them on the other side of the ocean; be it a dictator or an 'elected' official.
The lobbyists running the show in the background make money from both the destruction as well as the reconstruction. What is stupid about that?
The politicians later get appointed to lucrative executive roles at the companies which they helped enrich on taxpayer dollars (from both countries). Not stupid either. It's smart retirement planning.
The government is a lot of things but absolutely not stupid; fooling people into thinking it is incompetence is likely part of the ruse... It's a lot easier for people to sit back quietly and watch incompetence unfold, then it is to sit back and watch evil unfold. "It's incompetence" is also a nice easy answer which prevents people from having to look deeper as I have done here.
Julian Assange said about the war in Afghanistan: "The goal is to use Afghanistan to wash money out of the tax bases of the US and Europe through Afghanistan and back into the hands of a transnational security elite. The goal is an endless war, not a successful war."
If you look at any war, you will realize that the same principles are at play. Our current global monetary order has a built-in mechanism for monetizing destruction, unfortunately. It's architected that way, intentionally or not.
I've dedicated much of my life so far to try to convey this simple message.
It is surprising that you have the fabled MIC on top of the list of the nasties and not the international bankers. MIC is 2nd tier parasite layer in context of unnecessary and contrived warfare. On the top are the bankers who give loans to nations to buy these expensive weapons. They have no competition either, unlike the MIC players who have to chase contracts and compete. Only a select few get to print money out of thin air and they have no competition.
"Who runs barter town" is imho the most geopolitically illuminating sentence to ever come out of Hollywood.. That's what it's all about.
it's stupid because there are ways of turning a profit without killing thousands of people while turning your own country into a pariah ridiculed by the whole world. It's stupid because it's shortsighted.
I want to see it that way too but it seems they've been winning for a very long time with this approach. So is it short-sighted?
The way I see it there is a deep systemic issue beneath this which makes this profitable. That's the flaw which has to be solved.
Private entities should not be able to profit from taxpayer money on such vast scales. Military contacts are massive, foreign aid is massive. It takes from a large number of public hands and gives to a small number of private hands. Diffuse harms, concentrated gains.
I hope you're right though and those issues will be fixed.
Under Obama's deal with them, Iran was quite content to not have nukes. Had the deal not been torn up, they'd likely never acquire nuclear capability in our lifetimes.
Trump's unprovoked attacks on them were not only extremely costly due to the Strait of Hormuz closing, but it underscored why Iran absolutely needs nukes to protect themselves. It's virtually guaranteed they'll attain nuclear weapons inside the next decade now.
That's what happens when you elect a narcissistic fraudster to run your country and its foreign policy.
It's not exactly rocket surgery, is it? Because they are fighting on the other side of the world. I feel like the article glosses over this way too quickly.
It's not surprising the US aren't winning. It's surprising they are at all able to do something that resembles waging war at that distance. Wars are incredibly hard to fight away from home. On the other side of the world? There is basically only one country in the history of ever that has been able to do that.
The article does go on to discuss the Kuwait case and that's a meaningful discussion to have, because actually winning a war so far away is surprising. It's interesting to dig into why that might have been, and the article briefly does. But why they aren't winning is less interesting.
For more meat on how important a factor distance is, Bueno de Mesquita's The War Trap presents one of the most accurate models for predicting wars[1] I know of. That model measures the fighting ability of a country by two factors:
1. It's at-home military power as a sum of population size, metal production, fuel consumption, military expenditure, etc.
2. It's power projection as the distance between its capital and the closest point of enemy land.
Note that the second number is weighted equally to the sum of all other factors, because wars are a logistical nightmare.
I was thinking of the British Empire. Their naval technology was superior enough to overpower the distance term.
I was under the impression the Dutch didn't really wage interstate war in the same sense, but rather that a bunch of paramilitary private organisations happened to fly Dutch flags. I have to admit I know very little about the Spanish case, but again I thought they mainly fought proxy wars with other European colonial powers, i.e. both were equally disadvantaged by distance.
Well Spain had most of south America, some of the carribean and the Philippines. The Dutch had the Spice Islands, half a world away. Portugal had Brazil, Azores, a bit of India and a base in China.
France had most of continental Europe, with distances that were much greater comparitively, considering they only had horses and sail boats. They also had big interests in the Indian ocean, Madagascar for instance, and the Caribbean.
Wiping out the natives isn’t the same thing as waging a war. Even from the beginning the European empires had very tenuous control over their New World colonies* and once they had to actually fight wars against well equipped European colonists to defend their control, it was a disaster for them (Bolivar, American Revolution, French and Indian war, etc).
The closest counterexample is probably the partitioning of China but that’s got its own mitigating factors
* they couldn’t even enforce the most basic sovereignty like when Spain introduced the New Laws and the encomenderos were like “lol no”
The US defines its objectives on a large scale (e.g. regime change, or peace in the Middle East), but doesn't then use tactics that can achieve that.
What they're doing in Iran, for example, is probably best described as 'raiding'--quick, damaging strikes--but that doesn't lead to the final result they want. It hurts the attacked country, but it doesn't control it.
They are not wars in the narrow meaning. They are long term superficial conflicts, that human history has not seen before. With the modern weapons and technology a traditional war should annihilate the globe in 3 days, not still f.. around after 3 years.
The whole theatre seems to happen for three purposes: media consumption to cause widespread bother, constant increase of defense budgets and multiplication of public debts. The top leaders are not the presidents but the owners of the three pilars: finance, weapons and media, which happens to be the same group of people (guess who).
Since 1992 we are experiencing a slow war that continuous for about 8-10 years before a new one begins immediately after the previous ends. It's a perfectly executed soap opera in episodes and seasons that has managed to persuade us that it's inevitable and natural like sunlight.
I wonder if part of the problem is impatience? Trying to conquer whole countries at the same time? Britain didn't take India in one go. It got concessions to trade from a port, then took over the port. Consolidated its power, then took the the next one. You need a bunch of powerful locals to see how they are better off with you there.
This Kind of War (reading list Marine Corps commandant 2026 Vietnam War) suggests the answer is that the US fought crusades through WW2. Then they got Korea; not absolute war, not a crusade. And the US had no reference frame for that. Who is winning and why and why are Americans dying for this?
Because, thanks to the 1st Amendment of the Constitution, NPR can define "winning" any way it wants!
The article is really a book review (i.e.,SPAM!), the title is clickbait. But also interesting, informative and worthwhile.
And that plus current global politics has me thinking that I was correct, back in '79, that I should either build an underground shelter stocked with all necessities or move to a remote location in South America (much cheaper).
Who is crying about that? You just mean the administration? If so, then sure. But Americans at large aren't under any illusions about whether anyone would or should be helping with this.
It depends on what "win" means. The US can win the opening military phase pretty decisively. The part that keeps failing is turning that into a political end state that can survive after the shooting slows down.
It should be no surprise that the US cannot immediately overwhelm Iran, which has prepared for war with the USA since the overthrow of the Shah in 1979. Iran's new leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in November 1979, one day after 66 American diplomats and civilians were taken hostage at the U.S. embassy in Tehran, labelled the USA "the Great Satan":
Consider that, since that time (46 years), much of Iran's income has been directed to preparation for surviving nuclear war with the USA. Ergo underground living and production facilities, similar to those that the Soviet Union has constructed in Russia:
Defeating such an entrenched enemy requires conquering surface forces, then denying each bunker access to the surface and bunker-by-bunker surrender, asphyxiation or destruction. This requires boots on the ground and/or automation beyond the current SOA.
The alternative is to allow Iran to possess nuclear weapons.
> The US can win the opening military phase pretty decisively.
Can they? Iran seems to have destroyed them pretty decisively, after the literal first day of casualties (which were happening while Iran thought it had just reached an agreement that would prevent a war, per the Omani negotiators at that time).
Which requires troops in the ground, a large civil administration, and a way of making some ofthe existing powers in the civilian population feel like they are better off under you
They are pretty good in the comment sections online.
In the real world, they choose to engage in wars that provide political power for the underlying party in power, without having a clear goal or objective on how the war would benefit the average U.S. person. This becomes more and more apparent as they continue to lose, until it’s viewed as a “success” by an invented exit criteria at the 11th hour.
Wars are not declared wars since WWII. They are instruments of international or domestic political projection. Lately, a distraction from damning evidence of the largest illicit sex, blackmail and money-laundering operation in recorded history.
"Weapons of Mass Destruction" a lie. "Weapons of Mass Distraction" a cover-up, and a mistake about to grow bigger than Putin's "walk in the park" in Ukraine.
A war based on politics and not national survival is unwinnable.
super easy for US to kill lots of innocent civilians tho
just get rid of the agencies responsible for reviewing targets for civilians
imagine one person being able to put the entire country into yet another forever war
it will be 2029 and this nightmare will still be going down, sucking trillions from our economy while everyone suffers his damn ego
now we are taking out civilian bridges and water supplies, Iranians will never forgive us for generations, wait a another decade or two and the idiots here will elect someone even worse
btw diesel will hit all time record by the end of this year so even those who really don't care kids are being murdered for no reason might finally take it personally
I assumed the point of war these days was largely just money making. "Winning" puts an end to the grift - it's far more profitable to keep a nice long term rolling boil going.
... possibly due to the lying bumblefucks who start them. George W Bush was a lying bumblefuck who talked himself into being a war criminal who can't travel to certain countries. Trump is the kind of lying bumblefuck who lets a dependent bumblefuck that Netanyahu is to talk him into the dumbest and most embarrassing military engagement in US history of my lifetime, possibly only next to Grenada
npr, btw, is in some sort of decline in news source legitimacy having to resort to these simple-minded click bait headlines ...
Bush won the conventional war in Iraq and generally the US military was quite good at that part (same in Afghanistan or the first Gulf War). They had no clue what to do after the war was won and made a complete mess of it.
Trump hasn’t got the slightest idea how to even get as far as Bush did..
US did not occupy the country- they occupied the big cities and a built a huge airbase. Countryside was in Taliban hands for the most part.
US never closed the border with Pakistani - and the talibans retreated in Paki when under attack and then went back in Afghanistan when things calmed down.
In Afghanistan US won as much as it won in Vietnam.
Not really. Or rather not on the same level. Both the government and the military were reasonably competent when it came to winning the conventional wars back then. Both failed at handling the insurgency phase (the political leadership to a larger extent).
Now? Who knows, I guess the military is doing reasonably fine given the constraints they operate under but I doubt competent is the right word.
What is clear is that Bush (in combination with his administration) was pretty much Napoleon compared to Trump, Hegseth & co.
First the meaning of "war" needs to be defined. FWIW, in the US, only Congress can declare war. IIRC, that really has not happened since Korea.
Also since WW2, none of these countries posed a real danger to the US Public, plus people in the US are not invested. Compare what the public in the US had to do in WW2 compared to these "wars".
If the life style of the Average US person is affected like in WW2, then you can bet these "wars" would never happen. Just look at what a slight raise in US Gas Prices cause. If gas prices did not go up, people in the US would not care at all what Trump is doing to Iran.
This "definition of war" reasoning is circular. It's not that these are not wars because Congress didn't declare them, it's that they are wars that are being waged illegally, at odds with the Constitution.
> First the meaning of "war" needs to be defined. FWIW, in the US, only Congress can declare war.
The Korean War was not approved by congress. And I don't see the point of bringing semantics into it. Are you saying that the Vietnam War, to take one, was not a war because there was no formal declaration of war?
I was not sure about Korea, but I am sure your are correct.
For Vietnam, yes, if you look back the Vietnam War was officially called a "Police Action".
The politicians back then knew it was not a "real war" because war was not declared, so they came up with a new name. Since then, the politicians do not even pretend to follow the law.
> Also USA is very sensitive about the other side's civilian deaths.
I'd argue that it's not sensitive enough. We've bombed schools and desalination plants.
If your goal in a war is to topple a regime and prop up a more friendly one, then you can't just bomb them to submission. All that does is topple the regime and replace it with a probably worse one. You need to convince the population that the new regime is actually better, and you don't convince anyone of anything by killing their kids.
> Also USA is very sensitive about the other side's civilian deaths.
Well depends what you compare against. Also its generally not worth wasting precision munitions (you have a limited amount of them to start with) on non military targets.
Iran is the norm now? And the USA self reporting about their own civilian victims (or military victims) is somehow to be trusted?
USA is attacking desalination plants and civilian infrastructure. It was doing it in the first stage of the war and led with those attacks in the second.
USA is killing fishermen in pacific. Just to make Hegseth feel like manly man. USA is engineering human catastrophe in Cuba. And it is supporting genocide in Gaza.
Swaping the dictator for one of your choosing is a relatively smart, yet immoral strategy. It is pretty clear to me that the current regime made a deal with the US to topple the old one. It is low cost but very short term. The new leader is as corrupt as the old one, and is simply playing both sides. The US does not posess Venezuela.
Based on alleged leaks in the NYT, they actually may have had a very similar tactic with Ahmadinejad. They just couldn't engineer the situation on the ground the way they thought. They got duped, to some extent, by Mossad.
But it's not as reductive and simple as your comment suggests. And there's probably still more to the story that the NYT hasn't yet (nor will for a while) leak.
Yeah, that Russian influence is really pernicious. Did you know that the vast majority of Members of Congress receive financial support from the pro-Russia lobby? And that leaders in both parties regularly tout their "devotion" to "our greatest ally" Russia? The Prime Minister of Russia has made 14 trips to the White House. He recently gave a speech to a joint session of Congress, receiving standing ovation after standing ovation from most of the chamber. We are currently fighting a war on his behalf. Many US states have laws restricting their citizens' right to boycott Russia. And so on…
Wasn't a war but a criminal kidnapping under Venezuelan and international law.
The White House asserts that it is defending the American people from the devastating consequences of the illegal importation of drugs by ‘narco-terrorists’ – consequences that could be compared to an armed attack against the US. However, in international law, only a kinetic assault with military or similar means qualifies as a trigger for self-defence.
Yes, but Maduro is not. His former right hand is in charge and Rubio is controlling her. It was not regime change, but an internal coup helped with foreign soldiers.
New leader is equally oppressive, but this time guided by American admin.
It's kind of complicated, because a lot of these are kind of political wars. Where the goal of the US is to not simply defeat the enemies, such as in WW2. They want to minimize civilian casualties and cause a regime change. Not always the easiest thing to do.
They half succeeded in creating South Korea. They succeeded in Iraq, which I like to always point out because that war is often cited as a "loss" for the US. Mostly because Bush declared it over when it was really just beginning.
Really hard to say what will happen with Iran. Everyone online likes to act like military prophets that know the future, but truthfully it's very difficult to predict imo. And what does happen depends probably on how deep the US invests into it. If they start sending troops in to invade, then that obviously changes things.
In WW2 thousands of troops could die in a single day and we wouldn't know their names until months or years later. Today a single troop dies and it is the first story on the national news. Millions of civilians also died, just the amount of soldier deaths would be the equivalent of 2-3 September 11s (worldwide) every day for a period of 6 years.
So we say "war" but modern conflicts are absolutely nothing compared to what has happened historically. Even though these new "wars" don't seem to have the same definitive results, the alternative could be much, much worse. We're much better off with the bomb critical sites, apply sanctions and political pressure methods vs. the send entire generations off to die methods of old.
The “special military operation” euphemism that both the US/Russia used in Iran/Ukraine does have a degree of truth.
These wars are really military engagements with directional objectives rather than truly existential wars with binary outcomes.
Modern wars really resemble Rome’s Germanic wars more than the Punic ones.
Russia's goal is direct annexation of about quarter of the Ukrainian territory and installing a lifelong puppet regime to control the other three quarters. Ukrainians stand to lose not just their voice and any semblance of economic prosperity, but also their very identity.
With the exception of extreme cases like Gaza, it doesn't get more binary than that.
I am from Ukraine, been stateside since the late '80s, but visited Kiyv and my hometown of Odessa once a decade ago. I am far removed. So many perished on both sides, but we can do nothing but stand by. Can't ask Ukraine to surrender, can't let Russia to get away with this, there is no RTB while VP is running the theater, while the dead are piling up. It's a forever war at this point. Tell me it's not and there is something to look forward to. My spouse is from Russia and can't even visit her homeland to see her aging parents. Semi-annual meetups in Turkey or the UAE, but nobody's getting younger.
From Ukraine's perspective it's existential for sure. Russia however, just revises its objectives every few months according to how well/badly its prospects on the battlefield are looking.
Isn't it more that they started changing objectives because their original objectives turned out to be unattainable?
I also think that for Putin it is pretty existential. Otherwise, they would have negotiated a temporary deal, took the pretty large amount of land that they had taken at the end of 2022. Work on another 'project' like Georgia for a few years, do a lot of disinformation campaigns in Europe in the meanwhile and then revisit Ukraine later. That would have a lot of benefits, like no reaming of Europe, no development of Ukraine's capabilities (resulting in a drastic drop in refinement capabilities), etc.
But he couldn't. It would make him look weak and would make him vulnerable to a coup. Continuing is the only way for him.
Russia's goals have far evolved over the course of the war, and started out comically ridiculous, prompting a great many people to ask questions about the information "bubble" around Putin. Over the past year, I believe most people would agree Russia has lost a LOT of ground when it comes to their war aims, even if not that much territory.
2014: seize Crimea (success, although it no longer serves any purpose) and Sevastopol (total failure, Sevastopol can no longer serve the Russian black sea fleet, and when it comes to the other goal: keep NATO out of the black sea, it's an even bigger failure. Russia has lost control of the skies above the black sea completely and are losing control over the sea of Azov, by withdrawing air defenses. Now go look on the map where the sea of Azov is to see the magnitude of this failure), prevent Ukraine from approaching NATO and EU (complete failure is putting it very mildly), keep Ukraine unstable (succeeded, until Euromaidan revolution, ie. actually this is a failure)
2022: maintain control over Crimea (looks to be failing, as in Ukraine still controls Crimea's water supply), build a land bridge to Crimea (successfull, except that they can't use their land bridge for anything), seize control over Ukraine's government ("denazify" Ukraine), demilitarize Ukraine (as in Ukraine accepts no to have an army. Obviously total and complete failure), and prevent Ukraine and others from coming closer to NATO (obviously total failure, and not just in Ukraine)
In June 2026, ie. about 4 weeks ago, Russia once again confirmed these goals.
Oh and they were going to do this in 3 days. Then in 3 weeks. Then in 2 months. Then they stopped making predictions. Today is day 1608 of their 3-day attempt.
When did Russia ever state they would accomplish all this in 3 days?
I have not seen any Russian official making such statements. 3 days declarations were mostly done by various "analyst".
‘Russia’ is not a human subject and can say nothing, and this is obvious, so the question is framed with propagandistic intent.
The judgment was the basis of the invasion. Lukashenko and state TV did however say it; more interestingly the Biden administration - which had access to internal discussion and wrongly credited the cognition and rationality of Russian bureaucrats - also/ affirmed it.
In fact victory was assumed to have happened instantly: the famous widely mocked hundreds of miles of stalled trucks in the opening week contained //no military equipment//: it was all police equipment for managing recalcitrants in Kiev. Why? Because the war was ‘always already’ won; it was just a question of taking possession. The basic structure they falsely thought they had imposed everywhere did more or less materialize and work in the SE
For example: https://www.rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/speci...
It may not be a lot of dying at once, but some modern wars are rivaling these catastrophic wars of old in casualties.
By some counts there have already been at least a million casualties in the Ukraine war, and in Gaza there is probably 100,000 casualties now (military + civilian). And, the conflicts in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo over the decades have produced about 5–5.4 million casualties, although accumulated over decades rather than in a single war.
So modern conflicts may be lower intensity and lest existential, but they can be every bit as deadly.
For Ukraine it's very much an existential war. If they lose, Ukraine will cease to exist. The only way of winning is, well, winning this war. It is also very much a real war, with hundreds of thousands of deaths on both sides, a true massacre not seen in Europe since WW2.
Trumps stupid war on Iran on the other hand is really just some air strikes, and Iran can win by just not losing, which is easy, because the US will not invade.
It's interesting how casually we replace concern for the population with concern for the political entity. No, the Ukrainian identity will not cease to exist with the replacement of the political entity.
They still remember https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor
What Russia has done in the past is take people who want to hold onto their old national identity and send them to labor camps far away where most will die, and migrate Russians to the areas so as generations go by Ukrainian identity would be fully gone.
Ask Ukrainians what they think about that. Putin made it more than clear that he wants to erase the Ukrainian identity. [1] In this case, the political entity of Ukraine represents the Ukrainian population, which wants to be free, democratic, Europe-oriented, and last but not least, never ever be under Russian dictatorship again.
Russias attitude towards Ukraine has turned borderline genocidal since the start of this war.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Historical_Unity_of_Rus...
You are stunningly unaware or maliciously ignoring the cultural genocide that Russia is engaging in, inside taken territories.
Children are routinely taken from parents and shipped off to Russia. Parents are encarcerated, conscripted, or slaughtered.
Do you have a source for this? The closest thing I've heard of was vague reports of children being shipped to Russia. I'm not denying it has ever happened, but the question is what is the motivation, how systematic is it, etc.
I mean Russia definitely keeps losing very many soldiers every day, I don't think that is comparable at all. It's completely different from US vs Iran.
Rome lost loads of soldiers in the Germanic wars too. The parallel is that these wars are too expensive (for a non-existential conflict) to take to fulfilment, but also can't easily be disengaged from.
> but also can't easily be disengaged from
I guess it depends on what you mean by "easily", but Putin could very much just say "fuck this" and turn off the war machine in one day and it's not at all clear to me that there would be much consequential blowback other than the personal humiliation of one man.
Would other countries now decide to attack Russia? Of course not. Would the oligarchs flip out and have him assassinated? No. Would the West disassemble the sanctioning apparatus? Eventually.
But the real downside is just simple humiliation and to prevent that, they will continue sacrificing young men.
Politics is a fucked up game.
This comment epitomises one of the reasons why the US does not and cannot win any war against a peer adversary.
Flawed data.
I don't even understand what this comment is supposed to be saying in relation to the previous one.
I mean I guess I disagree with the fact that it has any truth about being a "special military operation", when it is really an invasion where a country is trying to gain territory using ground forces etc. It's an invasion and a war, they wanted the binary outcome, they just didn't expect the opponent to push back so strongly.
Look at the body exchange ratios between The Ukraine and Russia.
Jan 29th: 1000 - 38 Feb 26th: 1000 - 35 Apr 9th: 1000 - 41 May 15th: 526 - 41 Jun 18th: 522 - 33 Jul 16th: 501 - 31
Total: 4549 - 219
The only sources I can find for that are all Russian. Wikipedia (Which I assume you will dismiss out of hand) says it's complicated to determine at best, as they both hide information and boost propaganda. At least don't state it as fact. No one actually knows, which is why citing sources is helpful so that weight can be added.
> send entire generations off to die methods of old
Of old? Isn't that what Russia is doing right now?
No, they haven't implemented mass conscription, and won't because even autocrats can't ignore public opinion
Not sure if the numbers are correct, but it looks like the number of Russians killed in Ukraine is about the same as the number of Americans killed in WW2. Does it matter if the state uses a carrot or stick to send a generation off to die?
These may be rookie numbers for Russia, but it's still significant.
Well there is Russian and then there is Russian. The elites in Moscow and St. Petersburg don't really regard people from the outer provinces as fully Russian, especially not the ethnic minority groups. They're expendable. Most of the casualties have come from those areas so far but they're starting to run out of potential recruits. If the authorities start conscripting men from the core cities and feeding them into the meat grinder then internal dissent will likely increase.
Russia does conscript men:
https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-ukraine-conscripts-war-combat...
Correct. Conscription in Russia largely happens to rural people, ethnic minorities and convicts. Russia is the way it is because a large enough number of ethnic Russian middle class urbanites don't give a fuck about anything, and Putin knows the moment he starts drafting them he turns them into anti war activists.
> modern conflicts are absolutely nothing compared to what has happened historically.
> vs. the send entire generations off to die methods of old.
Feel free to click and zoom yourself through the generational pile of almost a quarter million dead Russians below, armchair general.
https://200.zona.media/
Mocking him while linking to a BBC propaganda piece is funny.
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> single troop dies
Really, now? What national news do you watch? I have literally never seen current/breaking news stories about the death of American troops in action. It seems literally the most silent thing going on. I really don't know--are casualty numbers reported on a regular basis, from the "front"?
I would sometimes, after the fact, learn of repatriation flights or interment ceremonies for fallen soldiers. But only on a sporadic basis. Literally, I think I would be familiar with them by now, since Operation Desert Storm or so. This is not something they put on the news. I think that a comparison of casualties from allied and belligerent troops would be something to report, but if they do, it's just sort of being slotted into some Wikipedia article somewhere, I guess.
The #2 headline on nytimes.com literally right now is "Pentagon Identifies Two U.S. Troops Killed in Jordan". (Same slot for nbcnews.com; https://www.bbc.com/news/us-canada currently has "US soldier killed and one injured after Iranian attack in Iraq" as the top slot.)
Yesterday that NYT home page featured a cell phone video of the strike as the main story.
Right now, the front page of CNN's web site in the US has as the primary headline "Third US service member killed as US ramps up strikes on Iran"[1]. The secondary headline has the names of two of them.[2]
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/20/world/live-news/iran-war-trum...
[2] https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/20/politics/us-military-soldiers...
I’m fairly surprised you are not seeing them. As a test, I checked for US servicemember deaths in the Middle East in July 2026 and checked against my own recall from casual news consumption.
I knew of the helicopter crash (1) and missile attack (2). I did not know of the EOD accident (1) this weekend. So, 3 of 4 I knew about without any particularly directed effort to follow it (and the 4th, I’m sure I’ll see reporting about during the week but wasn’t consuming much content of any type over the weekend).
Front page of The Guardian. One death is breaking news and there were two deaths covered a few days ago and their names were released.
What national news do YOU watch? Seems like it's not good at covering the most important thing the USA is doing.
>> Really, now? What national news do you watch? I have literally never seen current/breaking news stories about the death of American troops in action.
It happened about three days ago. I'm not even in the US and it was a top headline here.
To "win" a war you must have specific and measurable goals. If your politicians start a war but cannot articulate such goals, you're going to lose. They'll assure you they will win, but they've already lost. They are bad at their jobs, why did you hire these morons?
I can't believe I had to scroll down to see this. Victory always flows down; you can have the most badass of technical equipment or cunning tactical victories in the field, then still quite enthusiastically lose the war, due to bad strategy or even the original political goals of conflict.
Or because the political goals were impossible or - almost breathtaking that this state can even exist - because the goals are entirely absent. Incidentally, having a "rotating roster" of different political goals probably counts as something worse than "absent", due to the illusory impression that it gives of "someone deciding something".
Has anyone does analysis on Home vs Away wars ? Russia is in a Home war. Similarly US is in Away war. Also being a land power vs sea power. US is a sea power vs Iran being a land power.
> why did you hire these morons?
The democratic process is the selection of incompetent people by unqualified people.
> by unqualified people.
That's what the public education system was supposed to prevent.
Which is why They have spent decades attempting to dismantle it.
Feels over reals.
The goal is to sell weapons during the war; then afterwards, sell loans to rebuild what the weapons have destroyed... And sometimes it's also to control access to natural resources or trading routes. They don't care who it is who facilitates them on the other side of the ocean; be it a dictator or an 'elected' official.
The lobbyists running the show in the background make money from both the destruction as well as the reconstruction. What is stupid about that?
The politicians later get appointed to lucrative executive roles at the companies which they helped enrich on taxpayer dollars (from both countries). Not stupid either. It's smart retirement planning.
The government is a lot of things but absolutely not stupid; fooling people into thinking it is incompetence is likely part of the ruse... It's a lot easier for people to sit back quietly and watch incompetence unfold, then it is to sit back and watch evil unfold. "It's incompetence" is also a nice easy answer which prevents people from having to look deeper as I have done here.
Julian Assange said about the war in Afghanistan: "The goal is to use Afghanistan to wash money out of the tax bases of the US and Europe through Afghanistan and back into the hands of a transnational security elite. The goal is an endless war, not a successful war."
If you look at any war, you will realize that the same principles are at play. Our current global monetary order has a built-in mechanism for monetizing destruction, unfortunately. It's architected that way, intentionally or not.
I've dedicated much of my life so far to try to convey this simple message.
It is surprising that you have the fabled MIC on top of the list of the nasties and not the international bankers. MIC is 2nd tier parasite layer in context of unnecessary and contrived warfare. On the top are the bankers who give loans to nations to buy these expensive weapons. They have no competition either, unlike the MIC players who have to chase contracts and compete. Only a select few get to print money out of thin air and they have no competition.
"Who runs barter town" is imho the most geopolitically illuminating sentence to ever come out of Hollywood.. That's what it's all about.
it's stupid because there are ways of turning a profit without killing thousands of people while turning your own country into a pariah ridiculed by the whole world. It's stupid because it's shortsighted.
I want to see it that way too but it seems they've been winning for a very long time with this approach. So is it short-sighted?
The way I see it there is a deep systemic issue beneath this which makes this profitable. That's the flaw which has to be solved.
Private entities should not be able to profit from taxpayer money on such vast scales. Military contacts are massive, foreign aid is massive. It takes from a large number of public hands and gives to a small number of private hands. Diffuse harms, concentrated gains.
I hope you're right though and those issues will be fixed.
If the goal is to deny Iran nukes then it's been succeeding.
So, where is the enriched uranium then? For now it's only a setback and it will make Iran only more determined to make a nuke.
Iran is never not going to want to make a nuke.
How much determinism they have is irrelevant.
Under Obama's deal with them, Iran was quite content to not have nukes. Had the deal not been torn up, they'd likely never acquire nuclear capability in our lifetimes.
Trump's unprovoked attacks on them were not only extremely costly due to the Strait of Hormuz closing, but it underscored why Iran absolutely needs nukes to protect themselves. It's virtually guaranteed they'll attain nuclear weapons inside the next decade now.
That's what happens when you elect a narcissistic fraudster to run your country and its foreign policy.
I'm not an American.
Gullible nonsense.
if anything they are looking at North Korea and confirming their belief that nuclear weapons are indispensable for their sovereignty.
Or at Ukraine that gave them up.
At this point, everyone is thinking about getting nuclear weapons.
It's not exactly rocket surgery, is it? Because they are fighting on the other side of the world. I feel like the article glosses over this way too quickly.
It's not surprising the US aren't winning. It's surprising they are at all able to do something that resembles waging war at that distance. Wars are incredibly hard to fight away from home. On the other side of the world? There is basically only one country in the history of ever that has been able to do that.
The article does go on to discuss the Kuwait case and that's a meaningful discussion to have, because actually winning a war so far away is surprising. It's interesting to dig into why that might have been, and the article briefly does. But why they aren't winning is less interesting.
For more meat on how important a factor distance is, Bueno de Mesquita's The War Trap presents one of the most accurate models for predicting wars[1] I know of. That model measures the fighting ability of a country by two factors:
1. It's at-home military power as a sum of population size, metal production, fuel consumption, military expenditure, etc.
2. It's power projection as the distance between its capital and the closest point of enemy land.
Note that the second number is weighted equally to the sum of all other factors, because wars are a logistical nightmare.
[1]: https://entropicthoughts.com/war-what-is-it-good-for
> There is basically only ever one country in the history of ever that has been able to do that
I guess you mean the British empire? Or Dutch? Maybe Spanish?
I was thinking of the British Empire. Their naval technology was superior enough to overpower the distance term.
I was under the impression the Dutch didn't really wage interstate war in the same sense, but rather that a bunch of paramilitary private organisations happened to fly Dutch flags. I have to admit I know very little about the Spanish case, but again I thought they mainly fought proxy wars with other European colonial powers, i.e. both were equally disadvantaged by distance.
Well Spain had most of south America, some of the carribean and the Philippines. The Dutch had the Spice Islands, half a world away. Portugal had Brazil, Azores, a bit of India and a base in China.
France had most of continental Europe, with distances that were much greater comparitively, considering they only had horses and sail boats. They also had big interests in the Indian ocean, Madagascar for instance, and the Caribbean.
And didn’t Genghis Khan more or less go to war with most of the known (and some of the unknown) world and for all intents and purposes win?
Without airplanes and powered ships too. A much bigger feat than the modern US vs Afghanistan.
Don't forget the Portuguese. They were a superpower thanks to their investment in maritime technologies.
Or the romans or the Mongols?
Wiping out the natives isn’t the same thing as waging a war. Even from the beginning the European empires had very tenuous control over their New World colonies* and once they had to actually fight wars against well equipped European colonists to defend their control, it was a disaster for them (Bolivar, American Revolution, French and Indian war, etc).
The closest counterexample is probably the partitioning of China but that’s got its own mitigating factors
* they couldn’t even enforce the most basic sovereignty like when Spain introduced the New Laws and the encomenderos were like “lol no”
The US defines its objectives on a large scale (e.g. regime change, or peace in the Middle East), but doesn't then use tactics that can achieve that.
What they're doing in Iran, for example, is probably best described as 'raiding'--quick, damaging strikes--but that doesn't lead to the final result they want. It hurts the attacked country, but it doesn't control it.
"Hear me, then strike" Themistocles
They are not wars in the narrow meaning. They are long term superficial conflicts, that human history has not seen before. With the modern weapons and technology a traditional war should annihilate the globe in 3 days, not still f.. around after 3 years.
The whole theatre seems to happen for three purposes: media consumption to cause widespread bother, constant increase of defense budgets and multiplication of public debts. The top leaders are not the presidents but the owners of the three pilars: finance, weapons and media, which happens to be the same group of people (guess who).
Since 1992 we are experiencing a slow war that continuous for about 8-10 years before a new one begins immediately after the previous ends. It's a perfectly executed soap opera in episodes and seasons that has managed to persuade us that it's inevitable and natural like sunlight.
In general, it seems that superpowers are no longer capable of winning wars against medium-sized powers.
the US being the only existent superpower
I wonder if part of the problem is impatience? Trying to conquer whole countries at the same time? Britain didn't take India in one go. It got concessions to trade from a port, then took over the port. Consolidated its power, then took the the next one. You need a bunch of powerful locals to see how they are better off with you there.
This Kind of War (reading list Marine Corps commandant 2026 Vietnam War) suggests the answer is that the US fought crusades through WW2. Then they got Korea; not absolute war, not a crusade. And the US had no reference frame for that. Who is winning and why and why are Americans dying for this?
> why and why are Americans dying for this?
This last one is to distract people from the Epstein files. And, maybe, get some oil as well.
Because, thanks to the 1st Amendment of the Constitution, NPR can define "winning" any way it wants!
The article is really a book review (i.e.,SPAM!), the title is clickbait. But also interesting, informative and worthwhile.
And that plus current global politics has me thinking that I was correct, back in '79, that I should either build an underground shelter stocked with all necessities or move to a remote location in South America (much cheaper).
Are you comparing NPR with Fox News and their definitions of victory.
The inside traders and people who benefit from a higher oil price are winning.
Is the US expected to win wars? We all know how Vietnam went. Maybe consider that before asking the "why" question?
Is Russia expected to win wars?
And I would rather see none of these stupid wars start in the first place.
What a strange comment.
Are you saying no one expects the US to win a war? Or that no one hopes they will? Honestly, I can't tell what you are implying, except "war bad".
> Are you saying no one expects the US to win a war?
I certainly don't
The question should be "why is it so hard for the US not to start wars".
America didn't have to do this. And now they cry that nobody is helping them.
Who is crying about that? You just mean the administration? If so, then sure. But Americans at large aren't under any illusions about whether anyone would or should be helping with this.
I've heard more than one complaining that Iran was an everybody problem because "nuclear weapons" and that the US is doing all the heavy lifting.
I usually reply to that with reminding them Obama solved the problem and that Trump destroyed that accomplishment out of spite.
Yeah fair enough, there's always someone saying anything :) But my sense is that this is not a commonly held view.
It depends on what "win" means. The US can win the opening military phase pretty decisively. The part that keeps failing is turning that into a political end state that can survive after the shooting slows down.
It should be no surprise that the US cannot immediately overwhelm Iran, which has prepared for war with the USA since the overthrow of the Shah in 1979. Iran's new leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in November 1979, one day after 66 American diplomats and civilians were taken hostage at the U.S. embassy in Tehran, labelled the USA "the Great Satan":
https://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2026/07/18/iran-ayat...
Consider that, since that time (46 years), much of Iran's income has been directed to preparation for surviving nuclear war with the USA. Ergo underground living and production facilities, similar to those that the Soviet Union has constructed in Russia:
https://www.bing.com/search?q=how%20many%20soviet%20%20under...
have been built and occupied in Iran.
Defeating such an entrenched enemy requires conquering surface forces, then denying each bunker access to the surface and bunker-by-bunker surrender, asphyxiation or destruction. This requires boots on the ground and/or automation beyond the current SOA.
The alternative is to allow Iran to possess nuclear weapons.
> The US can win the opening military phase pretty decisively.
Can they? Iran seems to have destroyed them pretty decisively, after the literal first day of casualties (which were happening while Iran thought it had just reached an agreement that would prevent a war, per the Omani negotiators at that time).
Which requires troops in the ground, a large civil administration, and a way of making some ofthe existing powers in the civilian population feel like they are better off under you
They are pretty good in the comment sections online.
In the real world, they choose to engage in wars that provide political power for the underlying party in power, without having a clear goal or objective on how the war would benefit the average U.S. person. This becomes more and more apparent as they continue to lose, until it’s viewed as a “success” by an invented exit criteria at the 11th hour.
Because US Leadership is inept. Have been since the 50s.
Wars are not declared wars since WWII. They are instruments of international or domestic political projection. Lately, a distraction from damning evidence of the largest illicit sex, blackmail and money-laundering operation in recorded history.
"Weapons of Mass Destruction" a lie. "Weapons of Mass Distraction" a cover-up, and a mistake about to grow bigger than Putin's "walk in the park" in Ukraine.
A war based on politics and not national survival is unwinnable.
Ask Putin, Trump, Mussolini and others.
"You lose 100% of wars you don't wage", Don Gretzky
what an ugly question
super easy for US to kill lots of innocent civilians tho
just get rid of the agencies responsible for reviewing targets for civilians
imagine one person being able to put the entire country into yet another forever war
it will be 2029 and this nightmare will still be going down, sucking trillions from our economy while everyone suffers his damn ego
now we are taking out civilian bridges and water supplies, Iranians will never forgive us for generations, wait a another decade or two and the idiots here will elect someone even worse
btw diesel will hit all time record by the end of this year so even those who really don't care kids are being murdered for no reason might finally take it personally
I assumed the point of war these days was largely just money making. "Winning" puts an end to the grift - it's far more profitable to keep a nice long term rolling boil going.
... possibly due to the lying bumblefucks who start them. George W Bush was a lying bumblefuck who talked himself into being a war criminal who can't travel to certain countries. Trump is the kind of lying bumblefuck who lets a dependent bumblefuck that Netanyahu is to talk him into the dumbest and most embarrassing military engagement in US history of my lifetime, possibly only next to Grenada
npr, btw, is in some sort of decline in news source legitimacy having to resort to these simple-minded click bait headlines ...
Bush won the conventional war in Iraq and generally the US military was quite good at that part (same in Afghanistan or the first Gulf War). They had no clue what to do after the war was won and made a complete mess of it.
Trump hasn’t got the slightest idea how to even get as far as Bush did..
Hmm, US did not destroy the Taliban in Afghanistan. So I do not think US won much in Afghanistan (for ex. bin Laden was killed in Pakistani)
They occupied the country and mostly/almost did accomplish that. 2002 to ~2005 were reasonably clam.
Then their failures to bulld a stable government brought the Taliban back.
US did not occupy the country- they occupied the big cities and a built a huge airbase. Countryside was in Taliban hands for the most part.
US never closed the border with Pakistani - and the talibans retreated in Paki when under attack and then went back in Afghanistan when things calmed down.
In Afghanistan US won as much as it won in Vietnam.
So you are saying the military is competent, but the civil administration is not? You might have his the nail on the head
Not really. Or rather not on the same level. Both the government and the military were reasonably competent when it came to winning the conventional wars back then. Both failed at handling the insurgency phase (the political leadership to a larger extent).
Now? Who knows, I guess the military is doing reasonably fine given the constraints they operate under but I doubt competent is the right word.
What is clear is that Bush (in combination with his administration) was pretty much Napoleon compared to Trump, Hegseth & co.
First the meaning of "war" needs to be defined. FWIW, in the US, only Congress can declare war. IIRC, that really has not happened since Korea.
Also since WW2, none of these countries posed a real danger to the US Public, plus people in the US are not invested. Compare what the public in the US had to do in WW2 compared to these "wars".
If the life style of the Average US person is affected like in WW2, then you can bet these "wars" would never happen. Just look at what a slight raise in US Gas Prices cause. If gas prices did not go up, people in the US would not care at all what Trump is doing to Iran.
This "definition of war" reasoning is circular. It's not that these are not wars because Congress didn't declare them, it's that they are wars that are being waged illegally, at odds with the Constitution.
A mobilisation such as what we saw in WWII is unthinkable because it'd crash markets. That's one reason.
The stock market did great during WW2, though.
Of course this time its not dominated by industrial conglomerates which can retool their factories to manufacture military equipment.
The DJIA was more or less flat during WW2. Not sure where you've read that it was "great". During the middle of the war it was down 35-40%.
That has nothing to do with it. Congress should still have to declare an operation like what is happening in Iran.
How would a future president ever be motivated to give power back to Congress I wonder? A coup by congress?
as the term rule of law suggest the legislative branch has the power to make the rules
I really hope that next time they do their job vetting nominations for the judicial branch.
The last time a mobilisation happened was the Vietnam War and it almost tore America apart. The Pentagon learned their lesson.
So, it will be quagmires from now on.
> First the meaning of "war" needs to be defined. FWIW, in the US, only Congress can declare war.
The Korean War was not approved by congress. And I don't see the point of bringing semantics into it. Are you saying that the Vietnam War, to take one, was not a war because there was no formal declaration of war?
I was not sure about Korea, but I am sure your are correct.
For Vietnam, yes, if you look back the Vietnam War was officially called a "Police Action".
The politicians back then knew it was not a "real war" because war was not declared, so they came up with a new name. Since then, the politicians do not even pretend to follow the law.
Because the military industrial complex is acting like socialist jobs program.
If the USA could produce 4000 tomahawks per day, instead of 400 per year the Iran thing would be over.
Also USA is very sensitive about the other side's civilian deaths.
> Also USA is very sensitive about the other side's civilian deaths.
I'd argue that it's not sensitive enough. We've bombed schools and desalination plants.
If your goal in a war is to topple a regime and prop up a more friendly one, then you can't just bomb them to submission. All that does is topple the regime and replace it with a probably worse one. You need to convince the population that the new regime is actually better, and you don't convince anyone of anything by killing their kids.
> Also USA is very sensitive about the other side's civilian deaths.
Well depends what you compare against. Also its generally not worth wasting precision munitions (you have a limited amount of them to start with) on non military targets.
> Also USA is very sensitive about the other side's civilian deaths.
Its literally bragging about the oposite while intentionally killing civilians.
In Iran USA has killed 1/4 of a civilian for every enemy combatant. That is unprecedented by any war level.
How could such a thing possibly prove that "USA is sensitive to civilian deaths"?
USA is just not sensitive to that. It is sensitive to lives of own soldiers, very much.
Usually it is couple of civilians per enemy combatant. So USA kills civilians at rates many times under the norm.
Iran is the norm now? And the USA self reporting about their own civilian victims (or military victims) is somehow to be trusted?
USA is attacking desalination plants and civilian infrastructure. It was doing it in the first stage of the war and led with those attacks in the second.
USA is killing fishermen in pacific. Just to make Hegseth feel like manly man. USA is engineering human catastrophe in Cuba. And it is supporting genocide in Gaza.
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Depends on the war. Venezuela was quickly won.
Swaping the dictator for one of your choosing is a relatively smart, yet immoral strategy. It is pretty clear to me that the current regime made a deal with the US to topple the old one. It is low cost but very short term. The new leader is as corrupt as the old one, and is simply playing both sides. The US does not posess Venezuela.
And out current administration was too dumb to understand Venezuela and Iran are not the same country.
Based on alleged leaks in the NYT, they actually may have had a very similar tactic with Ahmadinejad. They just couldn't engineer the situation on the ground the way they thought. They got duped, to some extent, by Mossad.
But it's not as reductive and simple as your comment suggests. And there's probably still more to the story that the NYT hasn't yet (nor will for a while) leak.
That wasn't a war, that was a palace coup
So was Russia's campaign to destroy the social fabric of the US. Without a single shot fired even!
Yeah, that Russian influence is really pernicious. Did you know that the vast majority of Members of Congress receive financial support from the pro-Russia lobby? And that leaders in both parties regularly tout their "devotion" to "our greatest ally" Russia? The Prime Minister of Russia has made 14 trips to the White House. He recently gave a speech to a joint session of Congress, receiving standing ovation after standing ovation from most of the chamber. We are currently fighting a war on his behalf. Many US states have laws restricting their citizens' right to boycott Russia. And so on…
Venezuela was purchased. Delcy. The rest was performative.
yeah OK ...
Wasn't a war but a criminal kidnapping under Venezuelan and international law.
The White House asserts that it is defending the American people from the devastating consequences of the illegal importation of drugs by ‘narco-terrorists’ – consequences that could be compared to an armed attack against the US. However, in international law, only a kinetic assault with military or similar means qualifies as a trigger for self-defence.
https://www.chathamhouse.org/2026/01/us-capture-president-ni...
Combined with a coup.
Is it a coup? Maduros government is still in control
Yes, but Maduro is not. His former right hand is in charge and Rubio is controlling her. It was not regime change, but an internal coup helped with foreign soldiers.
New leader is equally oppressive, but this time guided by American admin.
It is not under US control though. The new president is simply playing each side
This makes everything worse, not better.
It's kind of complicated, because a lot of these are kind of political wars. Where the goal of the US is to not simply defeat the enemies, such as in WW2. They want to minimize civilian casualties and cause a regime change. Not always the easiest thing to do.
They half succeeded in creating South Korea. They succeeded in Iraq, which I like to always point out because that war is often cited as a "loss" for the US. Mostly because Bush declared it over when it was really just beginning.
Really hard to say what will happen with Iran. Everyone online likes to act like military prophets that know the future, but truthfully it's very difficult to predict imo. And what does happen depends probably on how deep the US invests into it. If they start sending troops in to invade, then that obviously changes things.