• merthyr1831@lemmy.ml
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    2 months ago

    Every time this fucking meme is made I’m reminded that the US military is currently being embarrassed in the red sea by a non-state actor with zero air superiority, which began itself with a thousand-or-so civilians with AK47s.

    That or how Israel is currently struggling to achieve any kind of military victory against two groups of lightly-armed militias which rely on scavenged and hand-made explosives to defeat state-of-the-art tanks.

    Let’s not even remind ourselves about the Taliban.

    • Ferrous@lemmy.ml
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      2 months ago

      People who drop these kinds of memes still think warfare is carried out and progresses like it did in the Napoleonic era: two orderly opposed fronts clashing head-to-head in theaters with well-defined boundaries - where the adversary with more guns/people/resources win. Because more guns/people directly equates to military power, right?

      These folks would do well to spend even the slightest amount of time learning about fourth generational, guerilla war.

      Let’s take this meme back a couple hundred years and cast OP as a counter revolutonary American at the onset of the revolutonary war.

      /*Wants to have muskets to fend off british empire

      /*british empire:

      Starts to seem silly when you realize even our founding fathers were doing guerilla warfare not long ago.

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      I’m reminded that the US military is currently being embarrassed in the red sea by a non-state actor with zero air superiority

      Houthi rebels in Yemen are leveraging the mathematics of actuarial accounting to shut down the Red Sea. The cost of sending a ship into a free-fire zone skyrockets, compared to the cost of simply sailing around the Horn of Africa.

      If the Americans were doing the flotilla strategy of the WW2 era - where FDR realized he could build cheap concrete shipping vessels faster than the Germans could sink them - then the Houthis would be an ugly nuisance rather than an insurmountable stopgap.

      But international shipping has a zero-margin for losing ships. They’re not sending these things out on the ocean with the expectation of some attrition.

      • merthyr1831@lemmy.ml
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        2 months ago

        Yeah I guess if we’re doing hypotheticals then perhaps the US could suddenly overhaul its naval shipbuilding capacity, recruit thousands more sailors, and march through North Yemen within a week.

        • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

          More that we could switch to a smaller and more disposable shipping fleet, where any damage to a ship was negligible to the volume of trade

    • undergroundoverground@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      So long as you have an endless stream of brain washed kids who are happy to die, as they paradise at the end of a barrel, and are happy the kinds of losses they do you’ll be fine

      • merthyr1831@lemmy.ml
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        2 months ago

        Whether you see it as brainwashing or principles is irrelevant when they’re still capable of effective military resistance against superior nation-states.

        If anything, you’re right; people who are ideologically driven for their cause are the bane of a professional army; ideology is much cheaper and much more motivating than a paycheck and promise of a cushy pension.

        • undergroundoverground@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

          Ultimately, it was their resistance and their lives that were irrelevant. America got their oil and the CIA got their opium fields. It was no longer worth the cost of keeping American troops there. So, they pass on the burden of protecting their stolen assets on to the native people. Its textbook neo colonialism.

          Call that a loss if you like. Some people won big.