Military Folks, What's your thinking?

[TMF]

I can agree with you on those points, but I'm not sure staying helps either. Especially with the rest of our economic/foreign policy blunders of the last 50 or so years...
 

 

I have little doubt that our small forces in and around Kabul are the only thing keeping the Taliban from consolidating their forces and assaulting the city, the way the Pakistani Taliban did way back in the day.  Right now, they're doing large scale conventional operations in the outlying provinces, such as the one going on right now in Helmand.  I'm not sure how this could have a happy ending either way, but having the ANA continue to play whack-a-mole each time one of these large scale offensives kick off, it keeps the Taliban engaged and incapable of mounting anything against the capital.  Perhaps this back and forth will continue indefinitely, but I can't agree that an abrupt abandonment will be positive for us in the long term.  The answer isn't another surge in US troops either, but the drawdown has forced the economy down to where it will have to survive on its own, and it is greatly reducing the public's acceptance of corrupt government officials.

[TMF]

I recently watched this video. It details the casualties during WWII, which was eye opening for me. I had no idea the human toll during the fight between Germany and Russia was so astronomically high. The numbers were apocalyptic.


More interesting though was the end of the video, where they compare the data of WWII, and previous wars, against the last several decades of relative peace. It gives some hope that things aren't as bad as are made out to be by doomsday folks and the media. Of course, when looking at the data against history, it makes you nervous about how tentative that peace is.

http://m.omeleto.com/219202/

[Pete123]

TMF,

 

Many people don't realize the contribution the Russians made in WWII.  They killed 7 out of 10 or 8 out of 10 German soldiers and destroyed the Germans ability to make war.  Many in the US believe that we were the driving force in winning WWII and that simply isn't true.

 

I have a huge interest in the Eastern Front of WWII.  The reason is because of the will of the Russian people.  Not Stalin, not the Communists, not the leadership - but the people.  The Russians won the war because the common folks fought to the death to defend their country and protect their loved ones.  At the end of the day, that is the reason the Russians defeated the Germans.

 

The Russians had no military leadership when WWII broke out.  Stalin had killed all the good leaders as he thought they were a threat to him.  The Russians that were actually doing the fighting grew from rank amateurs at the beginning of the war to awesome warriors by the end.  Stalin didn't care about the people - he only cared about his grip on power. The Russian military vets came to learn that they meant nothing to Stalin in the years following WWII.

[Sam1]

Yeah pete, the eastern front is where a huge portion of the prolonged ground war occurred. In America, most of us only pick up on two things during WWII; the nukes and D Day