Tag: war

I’ve been reading the third volume of Oman’s excellent A History of the Peninsular War, and a particular passage on the solid reasoning that lay behind Napoleon’s self-obstructive and objectively suboptimal decision to refuse to appoint a proper unitary command to execute the invasion of Portugal and the attack on Wellington’s British army while simultaneously maintaining the Spanish occupation caused me to reflect on the limits imposed on evil by its own nature.

As has been shown above, from his own words, he [Napoleon] was conscious that he was too far from the scene of operation, and that mere ordinary directions to his lieutenants might not be carried out with zeal. ‘Je donne l’ordre. L’exécutera-t-on? De si loin obéit qui veut.’ But if this were so, it was surely necessary either that he should go to Spain in person, or else—the more obvious alternative—that he should appoint a real Commander-in-Chief in the Peninsula, who should have authority to order all the other marshals and generals to obey his directions, without malingering or appeals to Paris. Napoleon had deliberately created a divided authority beyond the Pyrenees when he set up his military governments, and instructed Suchet, Kellermann, and the other governors to report directly to himself, and to pay no attention to commands emanating from Madrid. King Joseph, as a central source of orders, had been reduced to a nullity by this ill-conceived decree. Even over the troops not included in the new viceroyalties he had no practical authority. Not he and his chief of the staff, but Masséna, ought to have been entrusted with a full and autocratic power of command over all the armies of Spain, if a true unity of purpose was to be achieved.

This necessary arrangement the Emperor utterly refused to carry out: he sent rebukes to Drouet for hesitating to obey the orders of the Prince of Essling, and he jested at the absurd conduct of Ney and Junot in conducting themselves like independent generals. But these officers were in command of troops definitely allotted to the Army of Portugal. Over the other generals of Spain he refused to allow Masséna any control, and he continued to send them his own ever-tardy instructions, which had often ceased to be appropriate long before the dispatch had reached its destination. If we seek the reasons of this unwise persistence in his old methods, we find that they were two.

The first was his secret, but only half-disguised, intention to annex all the Spanish provinces north of the Ebro to France, an insane resolve which led him to keep Suchet and Macdonald in Aragon and Catalonia, as well as the governors of Navarre and Biscay, out of the control of any central authority that he might set up in Spain. The second was his jealousy of entrusting the vast army south of the Ebro, far more than 250,000 men at the moment, to any single commander. He remembered Soult’s absurd strivings after royalty in Portugal; he knew that Masséna, though the best of soldiers, was false, selfish, and ambitious; and he refused to hand over to either of them a full control over the whole of the forces in the Peninsula. It was even better, in his estimation, to leave King Joseph a shadow of power, than to take the risk of giving overmuch authority to one of the two able, but not wholly trustworthy, marshals to whom he must otherwise have entrusted it.

Napoleon made a conscious choice to reduce the probabilities of defeating Wellington and conquering Portugal in order to reduce the risk of creating a powerful rival power on the Peninsula. He knew he couldn’t trust Soult or Masséna to remain loyal to him if either of them found themselves victorious and in command of an army capable of rivalling his own forces, so he refused to take the step that was absolutely required in order to win the war.

This is one of the fundamental weaknesses of evil, however strong it appears, however much potential force it has at its disposal. Self-interest imposes an intrinsic limit on evil’s ability to bring its power to bear, because it always has to worry about its forces fragmenting and pursuing their own goals instead of the obediently pursuing the goals set by the leadership. This, of course, is why evil puts so much effort into creating social pressures and false narratives its NPCs will blindly follow, and to ensuring that its NPCs never dare to think independently or in a critical manner.

Not when you’re able to produce the answer “THE US MUST INVADE [Fill-in-the-blank]” on cue whenever called upon by the Fake News. Tucker Carlson shares a compelling selection from his recent book about two neocon mediocrities who keep being called upon for their opinions on military matters despite their collective track record of complete failure:

One thing that every late-stage ruling class has in common is a high tolerance for mediocrity. Standards decline, the edges fray, but nobody in charge seems to notice. They’re happy in their sinecures and getting richer. In a culture like this, there’s no penalty for being wrong. The talentless prosper, rising inexorably toward positions of greater power, and breaking things along the way. It happened to the Ottomans. Max Boot is living proof that it’s happening in America.

Boot is a professional foreign policy expert, a job category that doesn’t exist outside of a select number of cities. Boot has degrees from Berkeley and Yale, and is a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He has written a number of books and countless newspaper columns on foreign affairs and military history. The International Institute for Strategic Studies, an influential British think tank, describes Boot as one of the “world’s leading authorities on armed conflict.”

None of this, it turns out, means anything. The professional requirements for being one ofthe world’s Leading Authorities on Armed Conflict do not include relevant experience with armed conflict. Leading authorities on the subject don’t need a track record of wise assessments or accurate predictions. All that’s required are the circular recommendations of fellow credential holders. If other Leading Authorities on Armed Conflict induct you into their ranks, you’re in.

Meanwhile, brilliant military historians and strategists like Martin van Creveld and William S. Lind are being ignored, to the cost of many thousands of lives.

Jim’s Blog notes that the USA isn’t merely losing its technological advantages vis-a-vis its now-smarter rivals, it is actually losing military capabilities it previously possessed:

As societies enter a dark age, military technologies are apt to be the last to be lost, and in the recovery from a dark age, the first to advance.

In dark ages, art declines, great buildings decline, ordinary people’s living standards decline, people harrow the ground with stones tied to bits of wood instead of iron plows, but weapons technology usually goes right on improving.

Our art is crap, we no longer build Cathedrals, but until recently, weapons were good and improving.

The 2018 Nuclear Posture Review has recently appeared, revealing that we have lost all nuclear military technology:

U.S. production of tritium, a critical strategic material for nuclear weapons, is now insufficient to meet the forthcoming U.S. nuclear force sustainment demands, or to hedge against unforeseen developments. Programs are planned, but not yet fully funded, to ease these critical production shortfalls.

This is euphemistic.  Recent attempts to produce tritium were fully funded, but failed, which failure resulted in new plans for new attempts to produce tritium, which have not yet been fully funded.

I have regularly remarked on America’s inability to produce tritium.  All existing nuclear weapons require tritium to juice their detonation, and without tritium, would produce a low yield explosion.  Tritium decays over time, and so fresh tritium continually needs to be added.  The US is out of tritium, has repeatedly attempted to produce more, and repeatedly failed.

The combination of a 10-point loss in the average US IQ with the systematic diversion of its best minds to irrelevant financial scams and other trivial activities means that the USA is now both less-populous and less capable than China and less capable than Russia. That does not mean the USA is devoid of military advantages, after all, it still possesses a legacy military that is larger and better-funded and more technologically advanced than any military in history, but the rot has now gone from being institutional and societal to infrastructural.

I mentioned previously that the US military is almost certainly going to lose its next war. It has neither the officers nor the civilian leadership that is capable of compensating for its infrastructural debilitation. What we are witnessing in Afghanistan and Syria and Venezuela is almost certainly the feeble last gasp of an empire in contraction.

“The consolidation of the states into one vast empire, sure to be aggressive abroad and despotic at home, will be the certain precursor of ruin which has overwhelmed all that preceded it.”
– Robert E. Lee

The level of bureaucratic incompetence plaguing the US Navy is almost astonishing, even without taking into account the way female crewmen have increasingly hindered the ability of the Navy to properly crew its ships. No wonder the Russians were able to defeat US forces in Syria; the Chinese have absolutely no reason to fear a US Navy that literally can’t even steer its own ships.

The Navy called three-star Adm. Phillip Balisle out of retirement to investigate the state of its operations. The fleet was in decline, with two warships so neglected they were unfit for combat. He delivered a sobering assessment.

In 2009, Balisle and a team of investigators had traveled to the Navy’s power centers, in Norfolk, Virginia; Hawaii and San Diego, interviewing senior enlisted sailors, private contractors and officers up and down the chain of command. They toured ships, gathered data and received briefings from senior officials in Washington.

They were alarmed by what they saw. Clark’s “optimal manning” had reduced crew sizes for warships. Destroyer crews had shrunk on average from 317 sailors a decade earlier to 254. Then the Navy shorted the ships even further, exacerbating what was already a critical situation. Ships had roughly 60 percent of the enlisted leaders needed to mentor and train young sailors. And to make up for the short-staffing, the Navy simply extended the crews’ workweeks.

Balisle’s team determined the Navy’s 283 surface ships needed 4,500 more sailors to be staffed to recommended levels.

The condition of those ships was also declining as the Navy reduced time devoted to maintenance. Ships that once docked for 15 weeks for repairs were sent to sea after just nine weeks. The effects were dramatic; destroyers the Navy hoped would last for 40 years were hanging on for just 25. Reports of problems with certain radar systems were up, and sailors were increasingly unable to make fixes on their own.

A legion of poorly trained junior officers aboard the ships were being promoted, Balisle warned, creating a generation of unprepared leaders.

Balisle’s report, dated February 2010, was delivered to Mabus and to Congress.

“It appears the effort to derive efficiencies has overtaken our culture of effectiveness,” Balisle said in the report. He then took aim at the “downward spiral” of the Navy’s culture, in which a commitment to excellence had been badly eroded.

“From the most senior officers to the most junior petty officer, the culture reveals itself in personal attitudes ranging from resignation to frustration to toleration,” he wrote. “While the severity of current culture climate may be debated, its decline cannot.”

The report left Work, then the undersecretary of the Navy and Mabus’ No. 2, shaken. He decided to act.

Work, a widely respected figure at the Pentagon, said he began using his monthly meetings with then Deputy Secretary of Defense Ash Carter and his counterparts at the Army, Marines and Air Force to detail the stress on the Navy’s ships. The Navy was being asked to conduct too many operations, Work told them, some of debatable merit. The problems were real, he said, and the risks to readiness considerable.

“We’re using the fleet too much,” Work told the Pentagon. “We have to say ‘no’ more often.”

Work said he brought Carter round after round of data showing the demands on the fleet were degrading its readiness to counter threats.

Specifically, Work recalled raising concerns about a request around 2011 to have two of the Navy’s 11 aircraft carriers — and their escort ships — in the Persian Gulf at all times, an unusual demand that would require putting off repairs and training.

The request came from the commander of CENTCOM, the uniformed officer responsible for all operations in the Middle East. In the military, the wishes of what are known as combatant commanders are all but paramount. They are often dealing with issues of utmost national security: the war in Afghanistan, the development of nuclear weapons in North Korea, ISIS fighters in the Middle East, Al Shabab terrorists in the Horn of Africa, the expansionist aims of China and Russia.

Individual combatant commanders, who report to the secretary of defense, are in charge of military operations inside six global regions, no matter which branch of the military is conducting the operation. The leaders of the Navy, Army and Air Force are responsible for delivering trained and equipped troops. They can lobby the Pentagon against an operation they feel is ill-advised, but the final say goes to the defense secretary, and ultimately the president.

Navy officials — from captains helming ships to three-star admirals — told ProPublica that many commanders’ operations seemed unnecessary, such as shows of force requested by allies, joint-training exercises with foreign militaries or so-called presence missions in non-contentious parts of the world. As Aucoin struggled to find ships to patrol off nuclear-armed North Korea, his superiors sent a destroyer to help the small Pacific islands of Tuvalu and Nauru enforce their fisheries laws.

Some extolled such operations as key to maintaining so-called soft power — keeping allies happy, telegraphing might without direct military force. But others saw them as a luxury a strapped Navy could no longer support. When the Navy had 600 ships, about 100 were at sea at any given time. With half as many ships, the Navy still keeps about 100 at sea. In other words, as the Navy shrunk its fleet, it increased the workload on its sailors.

The USA is almost certainly going to lose its next major war. What we are witnessing here is nothing new, it is absolutely normal for an empire that has indulged itself in imperial overstretch for generations to fail to fund its military infrastructure prior to engaging in the conflict that fatally exposes the rot within. And lest you appeal to the inherent strength of the American people, keep in mind, the United States of Diversity is comprised of a very, very different population than the United States of America of 78 years ago.

Ann Coulter makes a compelling case for military action by the Commander-in-Chief:

Who can say with a straight face that the importation of tens of millions of Latin Americans has not changed the character of our country, the safety of our people and the economic prospects of so many of our fellow countrymen?

The conditions on the ground in Vichy France were less altered by war than the conditions on the ground in America today, compared with America circa 1980.

By the way, what, precisely, is the “military purpose” of building schools in Djibouti? How about building walls, schools, bridges, hospitals, roads and water purification systems in places like Vietnam and Iraq?

Our military did that!

The U.S. Navy Seabees and Army Corps of Engineers have built all kinds of non-military infrastructure in, among other places, Djibouti, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, the Philippines, Bangladesh, Somalia, the Congo, Cambodia and Grenada — even in little Micronesia (population: 100,000).

A couple of years ago, an American sailor who had just helped build a school in Ban Nong Muang, Thailand, was proudly quoted in Seabee Magazine: “My recruiter told me to join the Seabees. He said they build schools in foreign countries for kids.”

The U.S. military does these things in other countries but, we’re told, can’t build a wall in our own.

You promised Americans a big, beautiful border wall, Mr. President. It’s time to deliver on that promise, no matter what the House, the Senate, the Supreme Court, the Federal Judiciary, the State Judiciaries, or the media says. Because if you don’t, nothing else you have done or plan to do is going to matter.

The protests will continue as long as Macron refuses to resign:

Violence erupted in France for the 11th Saturday in a row today as thousands of so-called Yellow Vest protestors demonstrated against President Emmanuel Macron’s government. It came two days after the head of state had accused British politicians of ‘tearing society apart’ by allowing a Brexit referendum in Britain, but today the chants in his own country were for his resignation.

The worst early violence was in Paris, and in northern towns including Evreux and Rouen, in Normandy, where tear gas and baton charges were used by police to restore order…. Today’s ugly scenes came on the 11th Saturday in a row of violence that now routinely reduces cities and towns to battle zones.

Mr Macron has since pledged that any attempt to damage pubic property will be treated with the ‘most severe action possible.’ Despite a range of concessions by President Macron including scrapping green taxes of diesel and petrol, the Vests continue to call for him to step down.

The anti-democratic whores of the EU do not represent the people. The Macron government is illegitimate and against the interests of France.

Owen Benjamin returns to 1984 to help the younger generations understand how they have been prevented from being able to see what is right in front of them after 34 years of ideological subversion:

Ideological subversion is is the process which is legitimate overt and open you can see it with your own eyes. All you have to do, all American mass media has to do is to unplug their bananas from the ears, open up their eyes, and they can see it there is no mystery, there is nothing to do with espionage. I know that espionage intelligence-gathering looks more romantic, it sells more the audience through the advertising, probably that’s why your Hollywood producers are so crazy about James Bond-type of three words, but in reality the main emphasis of the KGB is not in the area of intelligence at all. According to my opinion, and opinion of many defectors of my caliber, only about 15 percent of time, money, and manpower is spent on espionage as such the other 85 percent is a slow process which we call either ideological subversion or active measures in the language of the KGB, or psychological warfare.

What it basically means is to change the perception of reality of every American to such an extent that despite of the abundance of information, no one is able to come to sensible conclusions in the interests of defending themselves, their families, their community, and their country. It’s a great brainwashing process which goes very slow and it’s divided in four basic stages.

The first one being demoralisation. It takes from 15 to 20 years to demoralize a nation why that many years because this is the minimum number of years which requires to educate one generation of students in the country of your enemy exposed to the ideology of the enemy. In other words, Marxism Leninism ideology is being pumped into the soft heads of at least three generations of American students without being challenged or counterbalanced by the basic values of Americanism, American patriotism. The result the result you can see most of the people who graduated in 60s drop outs or half-baked intellectuals are now occupying the positions of power in the governor civil service business mass media educational system you are stuck with them you cannot get rid of them they are contaminated they are programmed to think and react to certain stimuli in a certain pattern you cannot change their mind even if you expose them to authentic information even if you prove that white is white and black is black you still cannot change the basic perception and the logic of behavior in other words these people the process of demoralization is complete and irreversible to get rid society of these people you have you need another 20 or 15 years to educate a new generation of patriotically minded and and common common sense people who would be acting in favor and in the interests of the United States society and yet these people have been programmed and as you say in place and you are favorable to an opening with the Soviet concept.

These are the very people who would be marked for extermination in this case, most of them, yes simply because the psychological shock when when they will see in future what they want, the beautiful society of equality and social justice, means in practice. Obviously they will revolt. They will be very unhappy frustrated people, and the Marxist Leninist regime does not tolerate these people, they obviously they will join the ranks of dissenters, dissidents. Unlike in the present United States there will be no place for dissent in future Marxist Leninist America. Here you can you can get popular like Daniel Ellsberg and filthy rich like Jane Fonda for being dissidents, for criticizing your Pentagon. In the future these people will be simply squashed like cockroaches. Nobody is going to pay them nothing for their beautiful noble ideas of equality. This they don’t understand and it will be greatest shock for them. Of course the demoralization process in the United States is basically completed already for the last 25 years, actually it’s over fulfilled because the demoralisation now reaches such areas where previously not even Comrade Andropov and all his experts would have ever dreamed of such a tremendous success.

Most of it is done by Americans to Americans thanks to a lack of moral standards. As I mentioned before, exposure to true information does not matter anymore. A person who is demoralized is unable to assess true information. The facts tell nothing to him. Even if I shower him with information, with the authentic proof, with documents, with pictures, even if I take him by force to the Soviet Union and show him concentration camp, he will refuse to believe it until he is going to receive a kick in the in his fat bottom. When a military boot crashes his balls then he will understand, but not before that, that’s the tragic of the situation of demoralisation. So basically America is stuck with with demoralisation, and even if you start right now, here, this minute, you start educating a new generation of Americans, it will still take you 15 to 20 years to turn the tide of ideological perception of reality back to normal normalcy and patriotism.

The next stage is destabilization. This time subversion does not care about your ideas and the patterns of your consumption, whether you eat junk food and get fat, it doesn’t matter anymore this time, and it takes only from two to five years to destabilize a nation. What matters is essentials. Economy, foreign relations, defense systems, and you can see it quite clearly that in some areas in such sensitive areas as defense and economy, the influence of Marxist Leninist ideas in the United States is absolutely fantastic. I could never believe it 14 years ago when I landed in this part of the world that the process will go that fast.

The next stage of course is crisis. It may take only up to six weeks to to bring a country to the verge of crisis. You can see it in in Central America now, and after crisis, with a violent change of power structure and economy you have the so-called period of normalization. It may last indefinitely. Normalization is a cynical expression borrowed from Soviet propaganda: when the Soviet tanks moved into Czechoslovakia in 68, Comrade Brezhnev said, “now the situation in brotherly Czechoslovakia is normalized. This is what will happen in the United States.

The demoralization of the West is now very clear to even the most superficial observer. Notice the link to Aristotle’s dialectic/rhetoric model; the demoralized cannot process dialectic even when it is right in front of him. Notice also how the former KGB agent specifically uses the phrase “social justice”. None of this was an accident. The SJW insanity we now see that is dominant in so many societal institutions is the direct result of American DE-MORALIZATION, the deliberate destruction of traditional American morality based on Christian Western civilization.

Which means we are deep into the destabilization phase and the crisis is rapidly approaching.

Between Russia and Ukraine. A retired officer from the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces spells it out for the slow and stupid.

First, precisely formulated and put on paper, any military-political goals involving a large-scale armed conflict with Russia would look like, to put it bluntly, delusional.

Could you seriously say things it would have to contain, out loud: “As part of a short military campaign, defeat the main forces of the Russian Army deployed at the state border of Ukraine; assault and capture the city of Moscow and St. Petersburg; proceed to the Ural Mountains and the adjacent areas of Western Siberia and force the opposing side to sign a peace treaty on conditions favorable to Ukraine.”

This looks so unrealistic that it’s hard to believe the Ukrainian military are even discussing it, let alone making some real plans on paper.

Second, even if the Ukrainian military were to get such an order, they would have to face the fact that they have no resources or capabilities to implement it, and that’s something they won’t have for quite a while. As of today, the Armed Forces of Ukraine have very modest, to say the least, Navy and Air Force. Let’s be honest, even the country’s ground forces are not much of a force.

To win a war against a supreme military power, one needs to deliver a preemptive decisive blow of the kind the enemy cannot recover from. With the military capacities Ukraine has now it’s simply impossible.

It’s only fair to assume the Ukrainian military know this just as well, which is why it appears highly unlikely they would be considering starting a war against Russia.

The idea of Russia invading Ukraine is just as unrealistic, first and foremost for one good reason, or rather the absence of any good reason, whether military or political, to do so.  While Russia does have the military capabilities to crush the Ukrainian Army, it’s completely unclear why that would be necessary or what the plan could be for post-war Ukraine in such a case.

The international community is also not very supportive of Russia, to say the least. Deemed by many world powers to be no less than ‘a force of evil’, Moscow would need to feel really politically suicidal to begin a military campaign against Ukraine.

There’s yet another important lesson history teaches us: states going through a serious economic crisis are very unlikely to engage in a war, let alone start it. It’s no secret to anyone that neither of these two economies under discussion is exactly booming. A full-scale war would add such a financial burden to their budgets that might simply devastate them.

Thus, the only place a war between Moscow and Kiev may exist is the narrative created by the relevant expert communities.

The idea that Russia is going to attack Ukraine, or vice-versa, is about as plausible as the idea that the RUSSIA-RUSSIA-RUSSIANS elected Donald Trump as President of the USA. The only reason Russia would have attacked Ukraine is if Hillary Clinton was elected, because she was going to invite Ukraine to join NATO.

Don’t believe the media narrative. Not with regards to foreign policy, not with regards to domestic policy. Because it is always and inevitably false.

That’s my assessment. I anticipate that the USA is going to back down and abandon Taiwan to the People’s Republic of China within five years due to the combination of carrier-killing technology and the absence of Neo-Palestinian interests in the South Pacific:

A rare and under-reported tense exchange occurred between US and Chinese military commanders in Beijing on Tuesday. A high level Chinese military official, General Li Zuocheng, told the head of the United States Navy, Admiral John Richardson, in a face to face meeting that Beijing would defend its claim to Taiwan “at any cost”.

“The Taiwan issue is an internal matter of China, concerns China’s fundamental interests and the national feelings of the Chinese people, and no outside interference will be tolerated,” Li Zuocheng said in a statement released by the Ministry of Defense, cited by the AFP.

Admiral John Richardson traveled to China for talks aimed at reducing “risk and miscalculation”.
After a series of recent instances involving US Navy warships making provocative passages through the Taiwan Strait — which the US says is its right according to freedom to navigate international waters, it appears China is going “gloves off” in direct statements challenging US military commanders.

Gen. Zuocheng, who is a powerful member of the Central Military Commission further told the US Navy chief: If anyone wants to separate Taiwan from China, the Chinese army will defend the unity of the motherland at any cost.

Alarmingly this comes after President Xi Jinping provoked an angry rebuke from Taiwan’s pro-independence president when he demanded during a landmark speech on Jan. 2  that Taiwan submit to “reunification” with Beijing.

And in a follow-up speech days after this before military officials, Xi took his belligerent rhetoric one step further by issuing his first military command of 2019: that “all military units must correctly understand major national security and development trends, and strengthen their sense of unexpected hardship, crisis and battle.” Xi had essentially ordered the Chinese military to prepare for war as his first act of 2019.

By contrast, the first act of 2019 on the part of the US Senate was to attempt to pass a law violating the civil rights of the American people to not engage in commerce with Israel. China clearly grasps that the USA is no longer an independent actor capable of defending its own interests, let alone upholding its erstwhile global hegemony, and will not be hesitant to exploit the situation.

The USA needs to get its troops out of the Middle East, out of Africa, and out of Europe immediately:

U.S. troops were among those killed in an attack in northern Syria Wednesday — the same day that Vice President Mike Pence claimed ISIS, which claimed responsibility for the attack, “has been defeated.”

The U.S.-led coalition in Syria, Operation Inherent Resolve, said a tweet that “U.S. service members were killed during an explosion while conducting a routine patrol in Syria today.” A U.S. military official also confirmed to CBS News senior national defense correspondent David Martin reports by Kurdish media outlets that at least two Americans were among the dead in the city of Manbij, not far from the Turkish border, after an explosion hit a coalition convoy.

The U.S. military has not said how many Americans were among the bombing victims, but at least one report said as many as four U.S. service members were killed. If true, Martin notes that it would be the single largest loss of U.S. life in Syria since American forces were deployed there in 2015.

The attack comes just weeks after President Trump declared ISIS defeated and said U.S. troops were coming home.

I’ve been reading the history of what many military historians consider the first true guerilla war, the Peninsular War between the occupied Spanish and Portugeuese and the French empire of Napoleon. And one of the remarkable synchronicities between that war and the US wars on Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria is the way in which the imperial power kept thinking that because it was winning all the battles, it was winning the war.

From A History of the Peninsular War, Vol. II by Charles Oman.

The net result of Heudelet’s operations was that the Marshal, at the cost of immobilizing one of his four infantry divisions, obtained a somewhat precarious hold upon the flat country of Entre-Douro-e-Minho. The towns were in his hands, but the Ordenanza had only retired to the hills, and perpetually descended to worry Heudelet’s detachments, and to murder couriers and foraging parties. Meanwhile 4,000 men were wasted for all purposes of offensive action. Vigo, Tuy, and Valenza had all been abandoned, and touch with the army of Galicia had been completely lost.

Even this modest amount of success had been denied to Soult’s second expedition, that which he had sent under Loison towards the Tras-os-Montes. The enemy with whom the French had to deal in this region was Silveira, the same officer who had been defeated between Monterey and Chaves in the early days of March, when the 2nd Corps crossed the Portuguese frontier. He had fled with the wrecks of his force towards Villa Real, at the moment when Soult marched on Braga, and the Marshal had fondly hoped that he was now a negligible quantity in the campaign. This was far from being the case: the moment that Silveira heard that the French had crossed the mountains and marched on Braga, he had rallied his two regular regiments and his masses of Ordenanza, and pounced down on the detachment under Commandant Messager, which Soult had left in garrison at Chaves.

Over and over again, the French armies would defeat the Spanish and Portugeuese armies, only to find themselves under constant low-level attack on the peripheries, as their messengers were murdered, their supplies stolen, and their outposts overrun. The USA can literally never win the wars it is trying to fight, and it is a complete waste of time, men, and material to try and prove otherwise. Because victory requires the acceptance of US rule on the part of the defeated, and that is simply never going to happen in Afghanistan, Iraq, or Syria.

 Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.