“History does not repeat itself but it often rhymes.”
Our problem is the rate of change has become so rapid we can’t recognize a pattern until it’s too late.
With the advent of drone warfare and automated manufacture where do the weapons stop and the Infantry begin?
Trump may well have the right idea.
From now on we just defend ourselves, let the rest of the world hash itself out, and play wack a mole when we recognize a true existential threat such as Crazy Expansionist Islamists With the Bomb.
And even then we just do the bare minimum to keep a lid on it.
We’ve already discovered we can’t be the World Police.
June 23, 2025 at 12:24 am
eon
Airpower is all well and good. So are nukes, for that matter.
Back in the 1950s many pundits, especially in the USAF, argued that nuclear weapons made ground forces obsolete. An American general replied “You will always need some poor bastard, with a bayonet on the end of his rifle, to winkle the other poor bastard out of his foxhole and make him sign the peace treaty”.
I doubt that that will ever change, even if the bayonet is a monoblade on the business end of a bead rifle.
The old saying was “The Airforce can take ground but you need the Army to hold it”, which is true in most cases.
The difference here is that nobody wants iran, nobody wants to rule it, they just want the bullshit flowing from the mouths of the ayatollahs and their cohorts to stop.
You don’t need boots on the ground to bring this to it’s desired conclusion, it’s entirely possible to bomb somebody back to the peace table.
That is, if you can find someone sane enough to negotiate and nobody in the iranian gov’t is there…yet…but there will be eventually
It will take a new government with nobody in it from the present one.
I’d say that was impossible, but then again that’s what they did to the Shah & Co. in 1979.
Of course, the new government will run into Piper’s First Law for Princes;
Never sign too many death warrants.
By the same token, never sign too few.
clear ether
eon
June 23, 2025 at 2:44 am
jdow
How else to crack through Americans’ everlasting sentiments against war even when it is clearly needed. This reaction by US citizens mimics what my mother taught me about my father’s (naturalized US citizen of Canadian parents) relationship with his family back in the Toronto Canada area. They were pushing the British side of the war, of course. The US was all WC Fields, “Go away, boy, you bother me.”
Americans always seem to think the enemy has no say in the matter when war is involved. Sorry, guys, the enemy gets a vote. And I am crazy enough to take a nation’s government at it’s word when it says it plans to destroy the US utterly AND is working towards nuclear weapons.
One thing I notice his how close Trump came to earning that TACO nickname. He REALLY does not want war. He just got stretched too far, Israel created the occasion, then Israel created the vacuum only the US could fill, and finally Trump rose to the need of the times.
Considering the amount of trouble our isolationism has gotten us into over two and a half centuries and more MAYBE this time we can stop with merely a 6 pack of bunker-busters. God, I hope so. The other three in the axis of evil are in more need of heavy attention now than Iran, Leave Iran to Israel while we keep the lid on Putin, Pooh Jinping, and wozname from the Dork Empire (North of South Korea). What they do at home is not our concern unless it affects world stability. When they mess with world stability they need chastisement, perhaps at a regime destabilization level. Then let the natives seize or not their chance.
The natives have that chance in Iran now; there is already enough of them to pull off regime change if of course it were not for the regime having the guns and not being afraid to use them on their own. But now, there is an opening.
Not so easy in ChiCom land, Russkieville, or even NoKo…the people are under the thumb, physically and largely even mentally. I don’t think they could or would pull off a coup or even a proper rebellion (ChiComs blew their chance after Tianemen, the Russkies after the fall, but of course those poor NoKo folks have never known or been allowed to know anything about anything but their Rocket Boy.
So, while Iran spits and sputters and probably goes down in a heap, we had better plan ahead as someone said, for what comes next with this evil trilogy of death dealers with nothing to lose and everything to gain…that always makes for a very dangerous enemy. And while we had the luxury of choice and timing as to our defense of the Jews, it won’t be at our option when the rockets start flying our way.
Will there be boots on the ground then? I don’t see how we can avoid it.
Trumps ‘TACO’ nickname is just a way for TDS sufferers to try and save face and is completely meaningless. Trump quite literally wrote the book on the art of the deal and most if not all of his detractors haven’t read it. It starts out with ‘make the most outrageous opening offer you can think of” A: you might get it, but more importantly B: you can’t negotiate up later, only down, so start as high as possible. The last part is ‘don’t be afraid to walk away from a deal if it isn’t going to work in your favour’ you don’t gain anything by giving up too much for something you can get somewhere else or in another way. The ‘TACO’ yappers assume that because Trump didn’t give up the entire country for less than they had at the start, a la ‘bama and byethen and prefers to quit while he’s ahead and make another deal instead that it’s a sign of weakness.
Nope, as my granddaddy would say “that ain’t chicken, that’s owl.”
I believe it was in one of Ambrose’s books where he was interviewing German soldiers from WW2. They said, it was astonishing the American soldier’s fought with such resilience. They said the Americans just kept coming and coming. Seems they would never stop coming, even though it was not their country.
A passage from someone’s book, I forget who, quoted a german soldier as saying that he’d taken an American prisoner and in his possessions was a cake in a box sent from home. He said “when I saw that they could afford to ship a cake all the way from America and it was still fresh, while we were having trouble feeding ourselves in our own country, I knew the war was lost” or words to that effect.
June 23, 2025 at 1:06 pm
eon
One German general (von Rundstedt?) was quoted as saying that “the problem with studying American military doctrine is that the Americans do not feel any need to adhere to it”.
This is similar to Gen. Philip Sheridan’s observation; “The American soldier will obey a sensible order, but he does so because it is sensible, not because it is an order”.
Mark the stock prices of the military-industrial complex companies now and in two months. Standby for Anduril to drop its IPO. Business will be booming. And please, pray for our men and women in combat arms. Let 45-47 be wise enough to tell the Neocons to piss off. Let Israel decaptitate the bastards.
Iraq/Afghanistan: Bush (Biden)
Libya: Obama
Vietnam: Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon
What I don’t see in the list is the name Trump. Maybe DJT end up acting like his predecessors (he didn’t as 45), maybe not. Unlike comic strip characters, however, I am neither a military genius nor a clairvoyant.
Still, this is exactly what I voted for: Peace through strength.
The Iranians essentially declared war when they seized our diplomats back in 1979. This was a violation of the ancient custom that diplomats are inviolable. They may be declared Persona Non Grata, deported, and told not to return, but their persons were never to be threatened or abused. If this were ancient Greece, the gods would be planning exquisite punishments for the Mullahs and their supporters. As it stands, the U.S. has been justified in striking Iran since 4 November 1979.
And Qubilai (Kublai) Khan valued Europeans- like the Polo brothers.
As a Mongol, he considered them significantly more trustworthy than the Chinese. A dynamic that exists in mainland China right down to the present. See “bread eaters vs. rice eaters”, describing the north/south (ethnic Mongol/ethnic Chinese) division in mainland China.
clear ether
eon
June 23, 2025 at 11:29 am
Oldarmourer
The biggest cause of all of the ME turmoil since then is that the Ayatollah’s regime lived to see 1980. If Reagan had been in office instead of the peanut gallery, the hostages might not even have been taken.
Alexis Gilliland actually wrote a short story called “Demarche to Iran” for one of Mike Resnick’s anthologies, “Alternate Presidents.”
In Gilliland’s story, Ford is narrowly reelected and when the Iranians get too frisky and take over the embassy, Ford is supposed to give a speech about how the Iranians may have land power, but we have a Navy.
He then flubs the speech and refers to our having *nuclear weapons* instead.
Hilarity ensues and the hostage crisis ends before it gets underway, to the disgust of the media who wring their hands at Ford’s supposed brinkmanship and maladroitness.
June 23, 2025 at 4:15 pm
David
True story: George (“The Long Telegram”) Kennan was testifying before Congress in (IIRC) the runup to Gulf War One, at which point he’d acquired a reputation as a dove. He was casually asked what the US should have done after the Iranians seized our embassy. “Oh…we should have declared war on them,” he replied, much to the consternation of the Democrats on the committee.
He then went on to explain exactly your point…embassies are considered inviolate and are treated in international law as the sovereign territory of the ambassadorial state, thus the Iranians had committed an act of war and we should have formally made that out…which in turn would have given us options we might not necessarily have had within the confines of the international framework of the day.
It’s worth noting that even the Nazis, the Imperial Japanese, and the Soviets never violated our embassies. It took a bandit regime run by Muslims to come up with that.
Islam has conquered 57 nations, with England and Germany next. Western civilization, what was once called Christendom, is in Islam’s crosshairs, championed by Iran. Iran’s proxies wreak havoc world wide. But their keys, the Big Goals, are ICBMs delivering nukes. You have no problem with your main character, a sniper, “retiring” his targets. You have no problem “disappearing” invading illegal aliens from the ranch. But your indestructible libido-driven fantasy shapeshifting terminators are just that, a fantasy. They don’t exist and cannot protect us. Blorp. You’re okay with Iran building their nuclear bombs and ICBMs? Then what?
I suspect that Islam itself may be doomed.
Until recently their Faith depended on interpretation by their clergy, so much so that Osama bin Ladin had to search the world for an Imam that would rubber stamp his agenda.
With the advent of AI and soon to be AGI those clergy will be rendered obsolete. Any child will be able to see the ridiculous contradictions foisted on the Faithful by those who would use the Holy Quran for their own ends, and it is those children who will have to be brainwashed to abuse the rest of us.
Islam, like every other Socialist Creed will drown in the sea of its own lies.
I see that others have chimed in on this, but I’ll say my piece anyhow: it is a categorical error to lump Trump in with his predecessors.
Trump is a Jacksonian [1] to the core, tempered by a modest does of Hamiltonian Commercialism: the latter is the part where he offers to make a mutually-beneficial deal instead of curb-stomping you: minerals in Ukraine, oceanfront redevelopment in Gaza, etc.
By contrast Trump’s predecessors have all been Wilsonian Internationalists in varying degrees, which has been the default position of American foreign and security policy since the War. Reagan was the least Wilsonian of the bunch…but even he wanted to play “let’s make a deal” with the Soviets over nuclear weapons.
Both Bushes; Obama and Biden; Clinton; Carter; Johnson and Kennedy; Eisenhower and Truman…all internationalists. And I don’t necessarily say that was wrong as long as we were fighting the Cold War: sometimes you have to make a virtue of necessity.
But after the fall of the Wall and the demise of the Soviet Union…we should have taken a step back, drawn a deep breath and seriously pondered what our foreign and security policy should look like in a post-Cold War world.
The last Jacksonian to occupy the White House was Teddy Roosevelt. Before that…I dunno. You might have to go back to Old Hickory himself.
[1] In foreign policy, “Jacksonianism” can be summed up in two core elements:
1. “Leave us alone and we’ll leave you alone.”
2. “F*ck with us and we’ll knock your d*ck into the dirt.”
Vietnam: US Armed Forces, “boots on the ground” beat the crap out of the NVA and Cong in every major battle and most smaller ones. So much so that we decimated their forces and forced them to the Paris Peace Accords in 1973. That the Democrat Congress refused to keep the obligations to supply and fund South Vietnam to maintain and train their troops is not the fault of our Armed forces. This allowed the north to invade and take the south two years later.
Iraq: Pretty sure we made a clean sweep there. Found and hung Saddam Husain. Set up a Republican and gradually drew down troops. Mission accomplished.
What happened to Iraq and Saddam, so scared Muamar Khadaffi that he swore off terrorism and gave up development of WMDs. Didn’t even boots on the ground for that. Then Democrats Obama and Hillary totally destabilized Libya.
Afghanistan: Within two months of setting boots on the ground, US Armed forces had driven the Taliban out of power, chased them into the mountains and established a new Democratic government. Then began the hunt for Osama bin Laden. That mission was eventually accomplished and Obama should have pulled out but didn’t. It took another Democrat, Biden, to orchestrate the debacle of withdrawing from Afghanistan and the country back to the Taliban. But, overall mission accomplished.
So I’ll argue the point that the US military lost in any of those countries.
35 Comments
Then is not now.
Learn from history so as not to repeat it.
But do not let history cripple you or kill you.
The German philosopher Georg Hegel is credited with saying, “The only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history.”
“History does not repeat itself but it often rhymes.”
Our problem is the rate of change has become so rapid we can’t recognize a pattern until it’s too late.
With the advent of drone warfare and automated manufacture where do the weapons stop and the Infantry begin?
Trump may well have the right idea.
From now on we just defend ourselves, let the rest of the world hash itself out, and play wack a mole when we recognize a true existential threat such as Crazy Expansionist Islamists With the Bomb.
And even then we just do the bare minimum to keep a lid on it.
We’ve already discovered we can’t be the World Police.
Airpower is all well and good. So are nukes, for that matter.
Back in the 1950s many pundits, especially in the USAF, argued that nuclear weapons made ground forces obsolete. An American general replied “You will always need some poor bastard, with a bayonet on the end of his rifle, to winkle the other poor bastard out of his foxhole and make him sign the peace treaty”.
I doubt that that will ever change, even if the bayonet is a monoblade on the business end of a bead rifle.
clear ether
eon
The old saying was “The Airforce can take ground but you need the Army to hold it”, which is true in most cases.
The difference here is that nobody wants iran, nobody wants to rule it, they just want the bullshit flowing from the mouths of the ayatollahs and their cohorts to stop.
You don’t need boots on the ground to bring this to it’s desired conclusion, it’s entirely possible to bomb somebody back to the peace table.
That is, if you can find someone sane enough to negotiate and nobody in the iranian gov’t is there…yet…but there will be eventually
It will take a new government with nobody in it from the present one.
I’d say that was impossible, but then again that’s what they did to the Shah & Co. in 1979.
Of course, the new government will run into Piper’s First Law for Princes;
Never sign too many death warrants.
By the same token, never sign too few.
clear ether
eon
How else to crack through Americans’ everlasting sentiments against war even when it is clearly needed. This reaction by US citizens mimics what my mother taught me about my father’s (naturalized US citizen of Canadian parents) relationship with his family back in the Toronto Canada area. They were pushing the British side of the war, of course. The US was all WC Fields, “Go away, boy, you bother me.”
Americans always seem to think the enemy has no say in the matter when war is involved. Sorry, guys, the enemy gets a vote. And I am crazy enough to take a nation’s government at it’s word when it says it plans to destroy the US utterly AND is working towards nuclear weapons.
One thing I notice his how close Trump came to earning that TACO nickname. He REALLY does not want war. He just got stretched too far, Israel created the occasion, then Israel created the vacuum only the US could fill, and finally Trump rose to the need of the times.
Considering the amount of trouble our isolationism has gotten us into over two and a half centuries and more MAYBE this time we can stop with merely a 6 pack of bunker-busters. God, I hope so. The other three in the axis of evil are in more need of heavy attention now than Iran, Leave Iran to Israel while we keep the lid on Putin, Pooh Jinping, and wozname from the Dork Empire (North of South Korea). What they do at home is not our concern unless it affects world stability. When they mess with world stability they need chastisement, perhaps at a regime destabilization level. Then let the natives seize or not their chance.
{^_^}
The natives have that chance in Iran now; there is already enough of them to pull off regime change if of course it were not for the regime having the guns and not being afraid to use them on their own. But now, there is an opening.
Not so easy in ChiCom land, Russkieville, or even NoKo…the people are under the thumb, physically and largely even mentally. I don’t think they could or would pull off a coup or even a proper rebellion (ChiComs blew their chance after Tianemen, the Russkies after the fall, but of course those poor NoKo folks have never known or been allowed to know anything about anything but their Rocket Boy.
So, while Iran spits and sputters and probably goes down in a heap, we had better plan ahead as someone said, for what comes next with this evil trilogy of death dealers with nothing to lose and everything to gain…that always makes for a very dangerous enemy. And while we had the luxury of choice and timing as to our defense of the Jews, it won’t be at our option when the rockets start flying our way.
Will there be boots on the ground then? I don’t see how we can avoid it.
Trumps ‘TACO’ nickname is just a way for TDS sufferers to try and save face and is completely meaningless. Trump quite literally wrote the book on the art of the deal and most if not all of his detractors haven’t read it. It starts out with ‘make the most outrageous opening offer you can think of” A: you might get it, but more importantly B: you can’t negotiate up later, only down, so start as high as possible. The last part is ‘don’t be afraid to walk away from a deal if it isn’t going to work in your favour’ you don’t gain anything by giving up too much for something you can get somewhere else or in another way. The ‘TACO’ yappers assume that because Trump didn’t give up the entire country for less than they had at the start, a la ‘bama and byethen and prefers to quit while he’s ahead and make another deal instead that it’s a sign of weakness.
Nope, as my granddaddy would say “that ain’t chicken, that’s owl.”
As for his negotiating techniques, it’s a lot cheaper to deliver a few bombs than a dozen pallets of hundred dollar bills.
Great ro hear these comments, illuminating.
Some tend to forget the ‘other poor bastard’ will fight for his country just as hard as we’d fight for ours upon seeing foreign boots on our ground.
I believe it was in one of Ambrose’s books where he was interviewing German soldiers from WW2. They said, it was astonishing the American soldier’s fought with such resilience. They said the Americans just kept coming and coming. Seems they would never stop coming, even though it was not their country.
A passage from someone’s book, I forget who, quoted a german soldier as saying that he’d taken an American prisoner and in his possessions was a cake in a box sent from home. He said “when I saw that they could afford to ship a cake all the way from America and it was still fresh, while we were having trouble feeding ourselves in our own country, I knew the war was lost” or words to that effect.
One German general (von Rundstedt?) was quoted as saying that “the problem with studying American military doctrine is that the Americans do not feel any need to adhere to it”.
This is similar to Gen. Philip Sheridan’s observation; “The American soldier will obey a sensible order, but he does so because it is sensible, not because it is an order”.
clear ether
eon
Dejah Thoris, America’s future girlfriend
Deety and her “twin” Libby?
Don’t forget the “Smart Girl”, Gay Deceiver!
Zar Belk!
Mark the stock prices of the military-industrial complex companies now and in two months. Standby for Anduril to drop its IPO. Business will be booming. And please, pray for our men and women in combat arms. Let 45-47 be wise enough to tell the Neocons to piss off. Let Israel decaptitate the bastards.
CHRIS,
SUPPORT LEVEL PORTION OF THE PAGE IS NOT SHOWING
Damn! I’ll get her back up soonest!
The difference being …
Iraq/Afghanistan: Bush (Biden)
Libya: Obama
Vietnam: Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon
What I don’t see in the list is the name Trump. Maybe DJT end up acting like his predecessors (he didn’t as 45), maybe not. Unlike comic strip characters, however, I am neither a military genius nor a clairvoyant.
Still, this is exactly what I voted for: Peace through strength.
The Iranians essentially declared war when they seized our diplomats back in 1979. This was a violation of the ancient custom that diplomats are inviolable. They may be declared Persona Non Grata, deported, and told not to return, but their persons were never to be threatened or abused. If this were ancient Greece, the gods would be planning exquisite punishments for the Mullahs and their supporters. As it stands, the U.S. has been justified in striking Iran since 4 November 1979.
Zar Belk!
Even Ghengis Khan valued diplomacy!
And Qubilai (Kublai) Khan valued Europeans- like the Polo brothers.
As a Mongol, he considered them significantly more trustworthy than the Chinese. A dynamic that exists in mainland China right down to the present. See “bread eaters vs. rice eaters”, describing the north/south (ethnic Mongol/ethnic Chinese) division in mainland China.
clear ether
eon
The biggest cause of all of the ME turmoil since then is that the Ayatollah’s regime lived to see 1980. If Reagan had been in office instead of the peanut gallery, the hostages might not even have been taken.
Alexis Gilliland actually wrote a short story called “Demarche to Iran” for one of Mike Resnick’s anthologies, “Alternate Presidents.”
In Gilliland’s story, Ford is narrowly reelected and when the Iranians get too frisky and take over the embassy, Ford is supposed to give a speech about how the Iranians may have land power, but we have a Navy.
He then flubs the speech and refers to our having *nuclear weapons* instead.
Hilarity ensues and the hostage crisis ends before it gets underway, to the disgust of the media who wring their hands at Ford’s supposed brinkmanship and maladroitness.
True story: George (“The Long Telegram”) Kennan was testifying before Congress in (IIRC) the runup to Gulf War One, at which point he’d acquired a reputation as a dove. He was casually asked what the US should have done after the Iranians seized our embassy. “Oh…we should have declared war on them,” he replied, much to the consternation of the Democrats on the committee.
He then went on to explain exactly your point…embassies are considered inviolate and are treated in international law as the sovereign territory of the ambassadorial state, thus the Iranians had committed an act of war and we should have formally made that out…which in turn would have given us options we might not necessarily have had within the confines of the international framework of the day.
It’s worth noting that even the Nazis, the Imperial Japanese, and the Soviets never violated our embassies. It took a bandit regime run by Muslims to come up with that.
Islam has conquered 57 nations, with England and Germany next. Western civilization, what was once called Christendom, is in Islam’s crosshairs, championed by Iran. Iran’s proxies wreak havoc world wide. But their keys, the Big Goals, are ICBMs delivering nukes. You have no problem with your main character, a sniper, “retiring” his targets. You have no problem “disappearing” invading illegal aliens from the ranch. But your indestructible libido-driven fantasy shapeshifting terminators are just that, a fantasy. They don’t exist and cannot protect us. Blorp. You’re okay with Iran building their nuclear bombs and ICBMs? Then what?
I suspect that Islam itself may be doomed.
Until recently their Faith depended on interpretation by their clergy, so much so that Osama bin Ladin had to search the world for an Imam that would rubber stamp his agenda.
With the advent of AI and soon to be AGI those clergy will be rendered obsolete. Any child will be able to see the ridiculous contradictions foisted on the Faithful by those who would use the Holy Quran for their own ends, and it is those children who will have to be brainwashed to abuse the rest of us.
Islam, like every other Socialist Creed will drown in the sea of its own lies.
Ghengis could only be pushed so far. Then, when insulted, as we were in 1979, he killed ’em all.
And the apologists come out of the woodwork…
I see that others have chimed in on this, but I’ll say my piece anyhow: it is a categorical error to lump Trump in with his predecessors.
Trump is a Jacksonian [1] to the core, tempered by a modest does of Hamiltonian Commercialism: the latter is the part where he offers to make a mutually-beneficial deal instead of curb-stomping you: minerals in Ukraine, oceanfront redevelopment in Gaza, etc.
By contrast Trump’s predecessors have all been Wilsonian Internationalists in varying degrees, which has been the default position of American foreign and security policy since the War. Reagan was the least Wilsonian of the bunch…but even he wanted to play “let’s make a deal” with the Soviets over nuclear weapons.
Both Bushes; Obama and Biden; Clinton; Carter; Johnson and Kennedy; Eisenhower and Truman…all internationalists. And I don’t necessarily say that was wrong as long as we were fighting the Cold War: sometimes you have to make a virtue of necessity.
But after the fall of the Wall and the demise of the Soviet Union…we should have taken a step back, drawn a deep breath and seriously pondered what our foreign and security policy should look like in a post-Cold War world.
The last Jacksonian to occupy the White House was Teddy Roosevelt. Before that…I dunno. You might have to go back to Old Hickory himself.
[1] In foreign policy, “Jacksonianism” can be summed up in two core elements:
1. “Leave us alone and we’ll leave you alone.”
2. “F*ck with us and we’ll knock your d*ck into the dirt.”
Don’t know what alternate history you’re reading.
Vietnam: US Armed Forces, “boots on the ground” beat the crap out of the NVA and Cong in every major battle and most smaller ones. So much so that we decimated their forces and forced them to the Paris Peace Accords in 1973. That the Democrat Congress refused to keep the obligations to supply and fund South Vietnam to maintain and train their troops is not the fault of our Armed forces. This allowed the north to invade and take the south two years later.
Iraq: Pretty sure we made a clean sweep there. Found and hung Saddam Husain. Set up a Republican and gradually drew down troops. Mission accomplished.
What happened to Iraq and Saddam, so scared Muamar Khadaffi that he swore off terrorism and gave up development of WMDs. Didn’t even boots on the ground for that. Then Democrats Obama and Hillary totally destabilized Libya.
Afghanistan: Within two months of setting boots on the ground, US Armed forces had driven the Taliban out of power, chased them into the mountains and established a new Democratic government. Then began the hunt for Osama bin Laden. That mission was eventually accomplished and Obama should have pulled out but didn’t. It took another Democrat, Biden, to orchestrate the debacle of withdrawing from Afghanistan and the country back to the Taliban. But, overall mission accomplished.
So I’ll argue the point that the US military lost in any of those countries.
Well said.