Afghanistan

We're getting our butts kicked, again. Eerie images of Saigon déjà vu.My heart goes out to the Afghan people. We know what hell is about to descend upon you. We saw what happened to you the last time the Taliban were in charge.We tried. No one in the world cares anymore. You're on your own. Sorry.Edited by AZPaul3, : No reason given.

Only the Afghans can solve the problems of Afghanistan.
Only the Syrians can solve the problems of Syria.
Only the Iranians can solve the problems of Iran.It's time we acknowledged that only Americans can solve the problems of America.
Like the Afghans and Iranians and Syrians we will get the government and order WE create.

Unfortunately, my Texas friend, you are right. This world is just not ready to be civil at home or abroad. Thousands more are being killed now, not for nation, but for religion.Edited by AZPaul3, : No reason given.

Edited by AZPaul3, : got my murds wixed

Considering several (who knows for sure???)Trillion dollars (enough to build one hellacious huge theme park), twenty years training their police and ?army, and a whole shitload of dead people and those asshole took over the whole fucking shithole before we could get out of Dodge.The US is really, really shitty at this.

Yeah the Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Raytheon types are not going to be happy. They just lost $1+T in future revenues.Gotta find a new war somewhere. What's happening in Iran?Can we finally get fed up with Kim Fatso-il and go take him out? It's a hilly country and with chinese supplies and russian advisors we could be involved again in ... well, let's leave that to the next generation.We shot our nut. Leave the others for the next generation of American old white men to make complete asses of themselves and keep the streak alive.Edited by AZPaul3, : extensive rewrite.

Edited by AZPaul3, : No reason given.

Edited by AZPaul3, : No reason given.

Not really. The news report I remember from one of the Iraq conflicts (Bush I's, I seem to recall) was that we used a lot of ordnance (eg, bombs, missiles, bullets) from our stockpiles which needed to be replaced. Well those stockpiles needed to be replenished. As I recall, that report said that that would take about 10 years, so that was 10 years of revenue for defense contractors.This time, on top of ordnance there should be other equipment that we didn't have time to move out of country and so had to leave behind (scuttled, I would hope). Though moving that equipment out of country should have been part of the drawdown activity, there's undoubtedly still some that had to be left behind.

Myanmar and the equatorial belt of Africa may be possible, watch out for the MSM coverage for hints of warmongering.Myanmar is possible.The Rohinga may be massacred and the US will get involved on their behalf. Soon news will get to them the northern Shan tribes are drug dealing and given their guerrilla talents, it should last forever. The equatorial region of Africa should also provide a similar quagmire.Edited by anglagard, : Provide a title

I wonder what Al will have to say about this in the TV series United States of Al?

Iran, not such a good idea. Trump, complete f***ing moron that he is, kept wanting to go to war with them thinking that we'd just walk right over them. No, not even close. Besides, all Trump has ever been any good for it making a big announcement of something big, but then never following through and actually accomplishing anything. So all he would have done would have been to start a big war with Iran and then immediately lose interest.Paul Rieckhoff is an Army veteran of 11 years who served in the Iraq War as a junior infantry officer. He was the founder, CEO and executive director of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA), America's first and largest Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans group. He is an activist and runs the "Angry Americans" podcast ("If you're not angry, you're not paying attention.").Malcolm Nance is currently an intelligence expert for the news shows. He's a retired Navy Senior Chief (Crypto Tech) with over 30 years experience in the intelligence community specializing in the Middle East and Russia (speaks both Arabic and Russian). At a speech he gave (Distinguished Speaker Series at USC, 10 Aug 2018 -- video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dOYuPWFUAc&t=1386s starting at about the 19:15 timemark) he mentions that Ice Cube's character in Three Kings (1999) was supposed to have been based on "this Arabic-speaking black Navy chief running around Southern Iraq blowing up missiles" which is exactly what he was and what he was doing in the First Gulf War. Notable is that Ice Cube's character, an Army staff sergeant is always addressed as "Chief", something that would never happen in the Army.Here is the video of the Angry Americans' first interview with Malcolm Nance, 16 Sep 2019. Two combat-experienced military veterans sitting there trading war stories and making observations from their military perspectives, but with Nance contributing the most. Around 9:30 they start to discuss Nance's experience with the Iranians, including having engaged them in combat, and his intelligence assessment of their capabilities and what a war with them would entail. So basically, they could send out against us swarms of small missile boats (armed with anti-ship missiles bought from China) that could overwhelm our ships' defenses.Basically that's what happened around 1870 after the invention of the self-propelled Whitehead torpedo. Suddenly the big expensive armored warships could be easy prey for swarms of small fast and cheap boats armed with one of two torpedoes each (much like our WWII PT boats (Patrol, Torpedo)). In response to that threat, navies developed a new type of warship which was lighter, faster and more maneuverable, and cheaper so that it could be built faster and in greater numbers. That new warship could form a protective screen in front of the capital ships. It evolved into the destroyer. 
We won't have to look for a new war, but rather it will find us as new "bush wars" will break out due to the collapse of this one.In my Classical Greek class around 1980, our instructor made an observation based on ancient Greek history. The Peloponnesian War (431–404 BC) was a huge war in which practically all of Greece spilt into two alliances fighting each other. War is expensive, especially the part of making weapons and armor and training warriors, but now when that long war ended there were armories full of weapons and armor as well as large numbers of experienced and highly skilled warriors who were suddenly without a job. Smaller kingdoms had many scores to settle with their neighbors but they could never afford to actually go to war over those issues, but now they suddenly had ready and fairly cheap access to weapons and mercenaries. As a result, there was a rash of "bush wars" all over the place.We have seen the same thing happening after every major war in the form of wars and border skirmishes between neighboring "Third World" states, wars of independence against colonial powers, revolutions and rebellions, etc. Armed conflicts after the US Civil War, WWI, WWII (including many wars of independence), Korea, Vietnam, etc.We can see some of that reflected in popular culture beginning with stories of banana republic rebellions. In the Doc Savage pulp stories of the 1930's, a very common villain would be an arms dealer or gun smuggler. After WWII, we were worried about Communist revolutionaries and so they became the typical bad guys. Coming into the modern era, it shifted to Islamic terrorists. And to domestic terrorists starting with Incel mass shooters and perhaps moving on to organized domestic terrorists like militias, white nationalists/supremacists, Republicans, etc. A common factor of all that is the ready availability of weapons.Remember when "peace broke out" with the dissolution of the Soviet Union a couple years after David Hasselhoff sang at the New Years Eve celebration at the newly opened Berlin Wall? (that was between the Fall of the Berlin Wall and Reunification; plus there's no causal relationship to the fall of the Soviet Union) The Soviet Union crumbled apart. The Cold War was over! Peace at last! But knowing something about that kind of history, I just braced myself for the many little wars that were to follow.First, the military was still there, but they had no funding, not even for food. So just to be able to eat, the soldiers started selling their equipment very cheaply to anyone. You could buy a brand-new MiG for about $25,000, but you had to tow it away yourself. Along with the equipment (much of which went to the Third World), Soviet soldiers also left to become mercenaries.But the scariest defections were the scientists, especially the ones with experience in designing and building nuclear weapons. I doubt very much that they haven't helped countries such as Iran and North Korea with their nuclear weapons programs.Interesting times.

Pick on somebody you can beat - like Grenada.

That's not the real issue.In the first gulf war (desert storm), there were clear goals (push Iraqis out of Kuwait), and they stopped once they had reached those goals.With the occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq, there were no clear goals and no way of knowing when to stop. That was the big problem.Of course, there was a reason that there were no clear goals. There was no good reason to invade at all.

If there's no good reason to invade, it doesn't matter whom you invade. The war is its own justification. Invade somebody you can beat.

Invading someone you can beat is just what we don't want. It's too easy. Not enough bombs, bullets and missiles will be expended in a short successful conflict. We need something protracted and expensive to keep supplied with weapons and body bags.