Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan slams France:
Some small European countries participating in certain operations under the U.S. umbrella and trying to assert influence bring no benefit to themselves or the region.
If they can conduct operations or deploy military forces in regions without U.S. support, let’s see it. But we know that’s not the case.
We don’t take seriously countries that hide behind America’s power to advance their own interests.
One contrast with the US Civil War: the Russian Navy gave a show of force in New York that may have helped the Brits to back off. The US is not coming alongside Russia to fight off the Brits in Ukraine.
The failure of our generals (and those of our Western allies) to properly analyze the lessons of the American Civil War resulted in untold unnecessary carnage in WW1. The British lost 60,000 young men as they marched their troops, in column formation, straight into the German machine guns during the several days of the Battle of the Somme. Undeterred, they did this sort of thing time and again. They were imbeciles.
Will our MIC analyze the lessons from the UKR-Russia war and realize that warfare has fundamentally changed? Will the US continue to focus on the purchase of expensive manned fighters, bombers, and aircraft carriers instead of drones and missiles? Will we continue to underestimate the power of cheap artillery? Will we insist on rapid maneuver which can leave the army stranded without logistical support and subject to enemy artillery barrages? Old habits die hard. The Russians are stupid right? Incompetent. That's what we are still hearing from our armchair generals.
Beating up armies of African and Asian peoples armed with more primitive weapons was not good training to face Germans with machine guns who didn't run away. The high command should have noticed the tactical/doctrinal & training deficiencies by the second Boer war, but they won THAT war by openly committing genocide against the Boer's women, children and old people in concentration camps by deliberate infliction of starvation and attendant diseases until the men surrendered- and so, never internalized the need to develop more modern tactics and train realistically for the new era of industrial based technological warfare BEFORE they "stepped in it".
The USA should NEVER have gotten involved in WWI, however the British were also quite good at propaganda, bribery and other chicanery, tricking our investment and financial magnates into overextending their firms on backing Britain to the point where the British tactical incompetence threatening to lose the war on the Western front caused our financiers to lobby for the USA to enter the war to enable them to recoup their investments rather than go bankrupt as they deserved- An early example of the well established US pattern that corporations make and keep profits but pass their losses on to the general taxpaying public.
Both Big Serge (i wish he wrote more often) and the tweet from R with A provide good reflections based on reality but rarely understood. Thanks Mark.
@clashreport
Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan slams France:
Some small European countries participating in certain operations under the U.S. umbrella and trying to assert influence bring no benefit to themselves or the region.
If they can conduct operations or deploy military forces in regions without U.S. support, let’s see it. But we know that’s not the case.
We don’t take seriously countries that hide behind America’s power to advance their own interests.
One contrast with the US Civil War: the Russian Navy gave a show of force in New York that may have helped the Brits to back off. The US is not coming alongside Russia to fight off the Brits in Ukraine.
The failure of our generals (and those of our Western allies) to properly analyze the lessons of the American Civil War resulted in untold unnecessary carnage in WW1. The British lost 60,000 young men as they marched their troops, in column formation, straight into the German machine guns during the several days of the Battle of the Somme. Undeterred, they did this sort of thing time and again. They were imbeciles.
Will our MIC analyze the lessons from the UKR-Russia war and realize that warfare has fundamentally changed? Will the US continue to focus on the purchase of expensive manned fighters, bombers, and aircraft carriers instead of drones and missiles? Will we continue to underestimate the power of cheap artillery? Will we insist on rapid maneuver which can leave the army stranded without logistical support and subject to enemy artillery barrages? Old habits die hard. The Russians are stupid right? Incompetent. That's what we are still hearing from our armchair generals.
@Manul
Beating up armies of African and Asian peoples armed with more primitive weapons was not good training to face Germans with machine guns who didn't run away. The high command should have noticed the tactical/doctrinal & training deficiencies by the second Boer war, but they won THAT war by openly committing genocide against the Boer's women, children and old people in concentration camps by deliberate infliction of starvation and attendant diseases until the men surrendered- and so, never internalized the need to develop more modern tactics and train realistically for the new era of industrial based technological warfare BEFORE they "stepped in it".
The USA should NEVER have gotten involved in WWI, however the British were also quite good at propaganda, bribery and other chicanery, tricking our investment and financial magnates into overextending their firms on backing Britain to the point where the British tactical incompetence threatening to lose the war on the Western front caused our financiers to lobby for the USA to enter the war to enable them to recoup their investments rather than go bankrupt as they deserved- An early example of the well established US pattern that corporations make and keep profits but pass their losses on to the general taxpaying public.