“In order to evaluate our recent military history and the gap between the rhetoric and the results,” says Andrew Bacevich, “the angle of analysis must be one that acknowledges our capacity to break things and kill people, indeed that acknowledges that U.S. forces have performed brilliantly at breaking things and killing people, whether it be breaking a building -- by putting a precision missile through the window -- or breaking countries by invading them and producing chaos as a consequence.”
SOCOM’s briefing slide seems to recognize this fact. 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, as SOCOM’s Intelligence Directorate points out.
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FOCUS: Nick Turse | Win, Lose, or Draw, US Special Operations Command Details Dismal US Military Record
Nick Turse, TomDispatch
Turse writes: "Winning: it's written into the DNA of the U.S.A. After all, what's more American than football legend Vince Lombardi's famous (if purloined) maxim: 'Winning isn't everything, it's the only thing.'"
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Nick Turse, TomDispatch
Turse writes: "Winning: it's written into the DNA of the U.S.A. After all, what's more American than football legend Vince Lombardi's famous (if purloined) maxim: 'Winning isn't everything, it's the only thing.'"
READ MORE
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