Nick Turse - If Spec Ops are the future of the US Military, it isn’t Winning many Wars
The U.S. has carried out a century of conflict,
killing people from Nicaragua and Haiti to Germany and Japan; battering
countries from the Koreas and Vietnams to Iraq and Afghanistan; fighting on a
constant basis since 1980. All that death and devastation, however, led
to few victories. Worse yet for the armed forces, the win-loss record of
this highly professionalized, technologically sophisticated, and exceptionally
well-funded military has, since assuming the mantle of the finest fighting
force in the history of the world, plummeted precipitously. .. An American century of
carnage and combat has yielded many lessons learned, but not, it seems, the
most important one when it comes to military conflict. “We can kill
people, we can break things, but we don’t accomplish our
political goals.”
Americans expect to be number one. First Lady Michelle Obama recently called the United States the “greatest country on Earth.” (Take that, world public opinion, and your choice of Germany!) Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton went even further, touting America as “the greatest country that has ever been created.” Her rival, Donald Trump, who for political gain badmouths the country that made him rich and famous, does so in the hope of returning America to supposedly halcyon days of unparalleled greatness. He’s predicted that his presidency might lead to an actual winning overload. “We’re going to win so much,” he told supporters. “You’re going to get tired of winning. You’re going to say, ‘Please, Mr. President… don’t win so much’… And I’m going to say,
‘No, we have to make
America great again… We’re gonna keep winning.’”
As Trump well knows,
Americans take winning very seriously. Look no further than the U.S. gold
medal count at the recent Rio Olympics: 46. The next highest total? Great
Britain’s 27, almost 20 fewer than those of the country whose upstart rebels
bested them in the eighteenth century, the nation’s ur-victory. The young
United States then beat back the
Brits in the early 1800s, and twice bailed them out in victorious world wars
during the twentieth century.
In the intervening
years, the U.S. built up a gaudy military record -
slaughtering native tribes, punishing Mexico, pummeling Spain
— but the best was yet to come. “Our troops are the finest
fighting force in the history of the world,” boasted President
Barack Obama in this year’s State of the Union address. In this he echoed
his predecessor, George W. Bush, who, in May 2001, declared that
“America today has the finest [military] the world has ever seen.”
In the years between
those two moments of high-flown rhetoric, the United States military fought in
nine conflicts, according to a 2015 briefing produced by U.S. Special
Operations Command (SOCOM), the umbrella organization for America’s most elite
forces including Navy SEALs and Army Green Berets. The record of the
greatest fighting force in the history of the world, according to SOCOM: zero
wins, two losses, and seven ties.
This dismal record is
catalogued in a briefing slide produced by SOCOM’s Intelligence Directorate
last September and obtained by TomDispatch via the Freedom of
Information Act. “A Century of War and Gray Zone Challenges” — a timeline
of conflicts ranked as wins, losses, and ties — examines the last 100 years of
America’s wars and interventions.
“Gray zone” is an
increasingly popular term of the trade for operations conducted somewhere on
the continuum between
war and peace. “Traditional war is the paradigm,” the briefing slide
asserts. “Gray zone conflict is the norm.”
While he finds a great
deal to fault in SOCOM’s analysis, retired Army colonel Andrew Bacevich, a
professor of history and international relations at Boston University, believes
its assessment of post-9/11 conflicts “is quite accurate.” Although American
politicians like Hillary Clinton regularly insist that the U.S. possesses “the
greatest military” on the planet, they avoid addressing the question of
what the country’s armed interventions have actually accomplished when it comes
to policy goals — the true measure of success in war. “We have not shown
an ability to achieve our stated political aims in a conclusive way at an
acceptable cost,” Bacevich says. “That’s simply a fact.”.. Read more:
