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[MetalSlimeHunt]

In short, I believe all the horrifying quagmires of the future should be fought almost entirely with drones.

I am the one to protect you from your enemies, and your true demons. I will isolate you, isolate and save you from yourself.

Go back to sleep.

[Max™]

Stay with me, safe and ignorant. Hold you and protect you from the other one, the evil ones, don't love you son, go back to sleep.

I love how I can turn Tool/APC way up and sing along and pretend I have a beautiful singing voice like Maynard, but in the end I am only good at drumming.

[Strife26]

Just that it's not "everyday farmers fight the US Army and triumph over them" but "everyday farmers repeatedly killed en mass by US Army, who are so riddled with uncertainty and paranoia by farmer tactics that they give up and go home".

The casualties on each side were roughly on par if I recall.

Not unless you do some very extreme massaging of numbers.

[smirk]

That argument is a hell of a lot harder to pull off when the war involves unfeeling drones without families, immune to fear, morale, anger, and any of the things a guerilla force is supposed to induce in a conventional army.

Without feeling, without passion... without judgement. Without judgement. Because it's judgement that defeats us.

[mainiac]

The casualties on each side were roughly on par if I recall.

Then you recall very, very incorrectly.  The casualties were no where close to equal and the American forces never lost a single large scale engagement.  It was rather like the more recent occupation of Iraq.

In short, I believe all the horrifying quagmires of the future should be fought almost entirely with drones.

Replace the word drone with close support aircraft and you have exactly what people like Winston Churchhill were saying in 1936.

War... war never changes.

[Culise]

The casualties on each side were roughly on par if I recall.

Then you recall very, very incorrectly.  The casualties were no where close to equal and the American forces never lost a single large scale engagement.  It was rather like the more recent occupation of Iraq.

To be fair, if you include South Vietnam as a US ally for casualty figures, the numbers start to balance out, mostly because the South took the casualties you'd typically expect an unmotivated, untrained, and poorly-equipped dictatorship widely seen (especially post-coup) as a puppet for imperial interests.  Given what the US did to South Vietnamese civilians, though, that may be giving the North and Viet Cong way too much credit, and South Vietnamese casualties certainly didn't do a single whit of damage to US morale on the home front. 

The US alone, though?  Casualties and fatalities both 1-2 orders of magnitude below the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong.  It was the perception of defeat that defeated the US, with the most famous illustration of this being the Tet Offensive.  Famous for evocative images of Saigon under siege even as US military officials had claimed their enemy was on the ropes and leading directly to a political crisis in the US, the Tet Offensive was a complete and devastating strategic defeat for the NVA and even worse for the VC, which was effectively gutted as an independent fighting force in spite of the reduced pressure post-Offensive, and drew a full third of its fighting power from the North thereafter.  It was not until later that Hanoi came to realize just how much damage they had done, not on the battlefield, but on the US home front.

[Orange Wizard]

War... war never changes.

"I believe that in the future war will be fought almost entirely with warriors riding griffins" - Cnut

[NullForceOmega]

Since morale is a really massive component of an army's effectiveness, I still stand by my assertion that they did in fact kick the crap out of us, not just as a military, but as a nation.  Asymmetrical warfare is effective that way.

[Strife26]

Since morale is a really massive component of an army's effectiveness, I still stand by my assertion that they did in fact kick the crap out of us, not just as a military, but as a nation.  Asymmetrical warfare is effective that way.

That's a poor way of putting it. Morale is a damn ephemeral thing and frequently doesn't affect a disciplined force very much except in the eyes of newspapers.

One side succeeded in their political objectives and the United States failed. As the good General put it, "War is the continuation of politics by other means."

[NullForceOmega]

Strife, as a fellow 19K I'd prefer not to argue with you, but the point stands that psychological attacks are incredibly effective at undermining even a well disciplined force's combat readiness.  That is why WE use them, and why they have been employed through the ages.  They damage people on an emotional level, and there is only so much of that a person can take before they start to fall apart.  Vietnam is just one example that came readily to mind.

None of this changes the fact that the US is person for person the most heavily armed nation of Earth, and that regardless of its individual citizens capacity, or lack therof, to be a good soldier, any force that attempted to fight on its soil would face a massively armed populace capable of inflicting crippling damage on their military.  Which is the core component of what I was talking about in the first place.

[Orange Wizard]

19K?

[NullForceOmega]

'19 kilo', M1 Abrams crewman.  I entered in '02, trained at Fort Knox before they shut down training there.

I don't know how Strife feels about the subject, but in Delta 2-81 crew rivalries were acceptable, but professionalism was highly valued, so it was best to avoid serious conflict with other tankers.

Edit, anyway that's all terribly off topic, unless we want to discuss military training and culture.

[Strife26]

Making the claim that NVA and VC actions won the war or were successful primarily due to morale dropping amongst US forces is incorrect. I don't particularly feel a need not to correct inaccuracies, regardless of who might be making them.

[NullForceOmega]

Strife, winning the war of the mind IS winning the war.  Once the will to fight is removed the conflict is over.  You can deny it until you are blue in the face, but this is historical fact, The tactics employed by the NVA and VC destroyed the US will to continue, they won.  Period, full stop, end of line.  You don't even have a counter argument except 'morale doesn't matter.'  If that was true why did the US lose?  Because we didn't commit our forces?  We most certainly did.  Because we were fighting a limited war?  That certainly helped their cause, as most of the US felt we had no reason to be there.  But ultimately the simple undeniable truth is they killed our willingness to fight them.

Don't like that interpretation?  Let's hear yours.

Or maybe you think what happened in Afghanistan and Iraq was just 'insurgents'.  We are losing these conflicts because they can and are destroying our will to continue fighting them, they make us waste resources putting out brushfires, all the while committing atrocities that get spread worldwide through assorted media sources until we won't or can't continue and bail, then they crawl out of their holes and go back to business as usual.

Yeah sure, we hurt the NVA and VC so bad they couldn't actually keep going, but we're still the ones who left the theatre without accomplishing our mission.

Just as a by and by, this:

"Making the claim that NVA and VC actions won the war or were successful primarily due to morale dropping amongst US forces is incorrect."

Is not an argument unless you're actually willing to back it up with something, which you have completely failed to do.  So by all means 'correct' me, because so far you don't have a leg to stand on.

[RedKing]

Discussions of the Vietnam War....Discussions of the Vietnam War never change.

So, there's already stories out there that Trump had cold feet about picking Pence at the 11th hour, and that Pence used campaign funds to pay off his mortgage.

Heck of a job, Trumpie. Heck of a job.