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Badassbab on 04 August 2010
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Rpruett said:
Badassbab said:

America has been through doom and gloom before. Civil War and the Great Depression spring to mind. It will come back. Weaker than before since there are other rising world powers and economically it's not dominant like it is militarily but even militarily it's been challenged. It's having a tough time putting down the Taliban insurgency who are mostly armed with 40 year old Soviet weapons and have limited financing and this has hurt it's prestige.


Meh, Militarily we haven't been challenged in a long, long time.  Taliban insurgency is not related to military strength in anyway.  We could rumble through the Taliban blowing up every building, location and position where we think we would find terrorists.    We use restraint because this isn't a war as much as a transfer of power. This isn't military force as much as a police force.

Militarily, we rumbled into Afghanistan / Iraq and had virtually no resistance. 

Not really. I mean sure you could nuke every part of the country but that's not victory at all. Russia, Pakistan, India etc could do that. There are over 140,000 troops from the most powerful military body in the world with the most advanced weaponary against something like 40,000 odd Taliban armed with old Soviet arms. To not call the fight against the Taliban a war is ludicrous. It's known as the War in Afghanistan. And the US has been blowing up every building, location and position they think the enemy is in otheriwse they wouldn't be doing their job properly. And to say you rumbled through Afghanistan and Iraq isn't saying much. Iraq was incredibly weak through the Gulf War and UN sanctions and Afghanistan was hardly a military power and not even unified under the Taliban, in fact most of the foot soldiers fighting on the side of the US were from the Northern Alliance.

For the US putting down an insurgency is once again proving to be far tougher than winning a conventional war. I think in any conventional war the US would win though at great cost against some of the major powers.