"Wehrmacht penis envy"

[Ricky B]

"unconventional battles have and always will be difficult to plan for, and "win" "

The US cut its teeth fighting and winning unconventional battles. Ask the Sioux, or ask a Philipino. It has triumphed in them pretty much every time, and only treason at home has ever got in the way - not enemy anything. In the field, it knows what to do, kicks ass and takes names.

Kind of a broad brush there, maybe accurate when applied to "wars" rather than battles but not easily in many cases, and not in dominating things in many cases - ie they were difficult in many cases. Look at King Philip's War, the Seminole fighting in Florida, the Apaches in Arizona. King Philip's War was the bloodiest fighting, as a percentage of population involved, of any fighting in America, I believe. Anyway, we lost plenty of battles in the wars, but yes, ultimately won most of the wars through attrition or at times, terror - just ask the Filipinos on that one, although I would suggest the Filipinos gave up the battle upon the promise of independence rather than through defeats in fighting or terror.

Yes that includes holding out a viable political end state, it includes relentless will. It also includes a constant unassuming fairness by fighting men in the field and a brutally realistic attritionist perpective at the command level.

The US military tradition has very little to learn from the much less successful German one. Some stuff about staff professionalism and training to get it, and combined arms, much of which was already learned in WW II, sure.

But the modern maneuverist cult has been pretty much all bad, precisely because it has thrown away sound collective intelligence in the "American way of war", for a much less sound continental European tradition of flamboyant losing through reckless military gambling. Which always overpromises and undelivers, until the old truths of attrition warfighting force themselves back in.

I guess I just don't see this with our military, but then it is hard to analyze when the fighting it still going on and so many things aren't public. But it seems to me that the tactics used to take out the Iraqi military and the Taliban in Afghanistan were very appropriate to what needed done, and overall the actions since to suppress insurgents has been reasonable, at least in Iraq, where there are issues related to limiting force due to Iraq being in charge. Afghanistan maybe not so much but I don't have a feel for that one nearly so well. Maybe you have some cites on issues tied to what you are saying here? I am just not aware of anything specific.

Rick