Semper Fi
Meet the new Marines, same as the old Marines:
After spending nine years heavily involved in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. Marine Corps has most of its troops again training for duty at sea and the kind of raiding operations the marines have long specialized in. While some marines will remain in Afghanistan until next year, most are now regaining their seagoing and raiding skills. The marines also believe that there will be more need for short term operations, where getting there fast is more important than staying around for a long time. To that end, the marines and the navy are scheduling a lot of amphibious exercises over the next year, something there has not been a lot of in the last decade.
Now if we can just maintain a Navy big and fearsome enough to get them to the beaches.
I wonder sometimes how different things would be today if Bush had taken this kind of approach to Iraq and Afghanistan. What if we’d ignored the nation-building aspect of the wars, and simply gone in with overwhelming force. Enough to really clean out the rat warrens, and hammer the enemy into submission. But then left. Letting the locals figure it out.
Would things be better or worse? We’d certainly be a hell of a lot richer. Both in money and in soldiers not lost to the peace-keeping and nation-building efforts. Would the natives have figured things out and developed any kind of healthy (aka, minimally totalitarian) government? Would Iraq and Afghanistan be puppets for Iran right now, or would they have found the balls to stand up to the mullahs?
On the flip side, we’ve got an anti-insurgency force that is second-to-none. Was it worth the cost though?
Just an interesting “what if?” I mull over sometimes.
I believe that’s called the To-Hell-With-It doctrine.
I’d take it one further and remind the locals that they don’t have to regroup as a nation. They can live the way they want to: as a bunch of tribes. The ones on the international borders control access to the ones in the center, the one with the airport controls air travel in and out of the region, the ones with the natural resources get to reap the wealth and don’t have to share, the ones with water and grain can sell or trade however they please, the one with the university and the pretty buildings can leverage them appropriately. After a while they’d all figure it out.
Nukem, I agree that “nation-building” is the biggest pain-in-the-ass imaginable, but I cannot say that we really have the option of dismissing it if we do go all in, as we have.
The simple reality is that, without it, the aftermath will simply be owned, lock, stock, and barrel (literally), by whatever group has the most firepower, motivation, organization, or whatever combo thereof. And that is VERY rarely going to be any friend of the US, or democracy et al. Forgo nation-building in 1946, and Stalin would have OWNED western Europe, no doubt about it.
As for Syria today… forget it. I am sorry, but, as an American, I am EXHAUSTED by the Middle East. I want the best for Israel, but, other than the Israelis, I am fed up to the gills with the lot of them. Starvation, wars, death, I DON’T CARE any more. Let ‘em eat Korans.
Sorry for my ambivalence.
The middle east has given me new appreciation for nuetron bombs.