this battle was horrifying 

*hint* he killed more than just one

Why would he think that?😅

Because of the 90s-2000s technological and cultural overlap.

I’m 20 too. I mean before the 2003 Iraq war that was the view of American power, before we we’re trapped in the Middle East for 20 years. Feels like we’ve always known about this war but feels forgotten like the Korean War because it was so short and as you said nearly 30 years ago.

You're 20 and your grandpa isnt 60 yet? Damn, babies havin babies over there is a generational tradition huh?

​@@nychris2258 You do know that you two sets of grandparents, right? And that couples often have an age disparity?

I’m 30 and my grandfather fought the Nazis in the Battle of the Bulge. The passage of time and generational shift is indeed weird.

Replace starcraft with hearts of iron 4 🤣

The Starcraft comparison is really good. This is what it would look like if you had a "30 minutes no attack" rule but one side could make expansions and the other couldn't. The really horrifying thing about Starcraft is when you realize the real world is like Starcraft but with hundreds of players and the game doesn't end. You get these massive forces that can crush a nation at a whim, but then there's no reset back to equal footing.

This is probably true... but mostly speaks to the overall doctrinal differences between modern integrated warfare and the... peculiar style common to the middle east. There's a sort of meme that Arab countries are notoriously terrible at war, but of course it's not because they're Arab. It's because most armies in the region are meant primarily to preserve the power of the state against its people, which means they don't generally *need* to be terribly effective in a high intensity conflict, and indeed, if they *were*, that would create a risk of overthrowing the government. For that reason, initiative and drive are discouraged, as well as a deliberate hindrance of the ease of communication. This makes it less likely than an ambitious general will attempt a coup, you see. Furthermore the military is subdivided into numerous competing factions, further discouraging the threat of uprising because then they'd all be worried about each other. At the same time the equipment cannot be too sophisticated because sophisticated weapons require at least a somewhat educated populace and education is both hard and scary to authoritarians. The US military is... not like that. An almost obsessive focus is placed on coordination and initiative, on being able to act decisively in a moment. There is a great deal of not only vertical but also horizontal communication between elements. Technical sophistication is, likewise, an almost obsessive goal. US equipment is neither cheap nor simple, but it is also not actually orders of magnitude more capable than Soviet equipment in terms of 'raw performance': Firepower, armor, etc. Where it does have a significant advantage is technically - sensors, communication, etc. This also extends to training and doctrine, US forces are expected to be able to accomplish general objectives even in absence of higher command, to take action on a unit-by-unit basis, which of course necessitates some level of understanding of the overall goal, but drastically increases operational tempo. They are not only highly effective at reducing enemy command and control abilities but also redundant in regards to their own. So the whole 'Iraq could have every great general in history against the Coalition guy who played starcraft that one time and still lose', yeah. But that's not so much because of the material superiority of the coalition (which is non-trivial, but like... even the US generals expected an actual fight), but because the Iraq side works to mitigate the advantage of good leadership and the Coalition side to mitigate the disadvantage of bad leadership.

imagine being the Iraqis prepared for a fucking protracted trench war and the coalition just drives over you with bulldozers, fills your trenches in, and keeps going

id recommend to look up stuff about the Iran-Iraq war, since it sheds some light on the many shortcomings and just general insane decision making of the Iraqi military. its also a more fair comparative framework since it was a peer to peer conflict. in short lower ranking soldiers were barely trained and pretty much every officer was only concerned with loyalty to the regime at all times instead of actually being good commanders. any perceived "disloyalty" would see them at best demoted and at worst often straight up tortured and executed. to be promoted it was the same, not on merit but connections. equipment wise they were with Isreal the prime military in the middle east, but their command structure was an utter sham.

I mean HW was the best (at understanding the world) foreign policy president we’ve had since like… Kennedy? Nixon?

What exactly was the Soviet Ground Docrtine at the time? I'm more familiar with their Air Doctrine of intercepting aerial bombers.

@@atlantiswolf the Soviet doctrine of the time was to implode in on oneself lol

@@alexhouseman5820 So it hasn't changed?

iraq really didn't have bad tanks, late t72 or locally upgraded lion of babylon versions, were on par with the m60 we still had in service there. they were just outmatched tactically and fighting from entrenched areas in antiquated tactics. they couldn't point their guns down far enough so had to expose their most vulnerable areas to fire. also, completely one sided air support...

@@pessimisticnihilist3691 yeah lol

lol

Also, the US dumping their whole stockpile because the USSR just collapsed

Biggest oh shit we can try out all this gear moment.

@@aaroncabatingan5238 Blue balled for 40 years

@@Delicious_Oreoz as George Carlin once said, it was a “go play with our toys in the sand” moment lol

its not really logistics that got the tanks in the desert its that the coalition forces had GPS integrated into their battle management systems so they always knew where they were, the iraqis had to follow roads. in this example but also in the rest of your message you understate just how large of a technological gap there is between the west and anyone else.

Can you blame them?

@@falconeshield Nah not really. It's by far one of the most justifiable things the US military has done in recent decades

Based

@@Alexander-cg1eyprobably one of the few things, honestly you could count them with one hand……and you would still have fingers

Yea, we did the same thing to the Nazis in WW2. The Falaise Pocket is an example of that

Yeah, and firing on them isn’t a war crime. Chasing down and destroying a retreating force is a key part of Soviet deep battle as well.

That is the very reason why cavalry existed since the dawn of war. To chase down the enemy combatant.

@@maccoat yep - and why aristocrats like fox hunting so much; it's good training for chasing down and killing the peasants on the other side once they're routed.

@@maccoat That is until cavalry was became more advanced than a guy with a horse and a spear

Nice icon. Slayer kicks ass

not to keen on suicidal human wave assaults into gas attacks huh?

Slayer does indeed kick ass

Wasn't his Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney?

@@alcaponefan1yep. And George Jr had Rumsfeld.

@@Pretermit_Sound wrong order, Rumsfiel was SR, Cheney was Jr

@@PabloVelasco-hr3ko George W had Rumsfeld as secretary of defense, and George HW had Cheney as secretary of defense. That’s the correct order, which is what my original comment was trying to convey

from what i remember, or i remember hearing that kuwait actually snatched up iraqi oil fields, iraq went in to take them back then we were like "WOOAH!! hey you can't do that! fuck off!" but, coulda been BS.

@@cobraglatiator yeah I think the only ones who said that was Iraq, also iraq never considered Kuwait an independent country but rather a part of iraq, kinda like with the current conflict between Ukraine and Russia

@@bronzebackbassing18 ah. i see. so it was bs then?

The US bombed Iraq's infrastructure to the ground and nearly induced famine with sanctions.

good american interventionism is an oxymoron

It depends, because the US occupation of Germany and Japan were successful. The thing is that with those two, the US didn’t attempt to satellize the states like they did with Iraq and Afghanistan.

@@rockmycd1319 First, only part of the country of Germany was occupied by us. How can you say an occupation is successful when half the country is a hellhole. Second, you are proving my point. We went in to do an occupation with bad goals that are not likely to lead to good outcomes. I’d argue Japan is currently far more of a satellite state for us then Iraq or Afghanistan too so even if that’s what we were supposed to get as an outcome, that is still no excuse

@@jloiben12 Germany was primarily rebuilt with American aid (as well as their own domestic economic reforms), so even if the US occupied the parts of Germany not handled by the Soviets not much would have changed. And yes, half the country was a hellhole; that half being the Soviet zone that was to effectively become an SSR along with the rest of the Eastern Europe, such a measure backfiring on them in 1953. And to say that Japan is a satellite state at all, let alone more so than Afghanistan and Iraq was, is laughable. Japan is in no way economically or politically dependent on the US. They're a powerhouse on the technological and automobile front, and have a stable political system not being propped up by the US. The same can't be said for Afghanistan, which had to be funneled with a trillion dollars of aid and an occupation to keep away an insurgency and maintain an unstable government and Iraq which was to maintain a similar level of dependency until sectarian violence in the Iraqi Civil War preceded withdrawal in 2011, having seen Iraq as too unstable to be an effective stronghold.

womp womp, get rumbled stay humble

In 2003 in the chaos of the invasion a huge amount of artifacts from the Iraqi national museum were destroyed and/or potentially lost forever, likely including the famous so-called “Baghdad battery” from the Parthian era, and countless other priceless pieces of human history.

@@ByzantineDarkwraith Is a reckless disregard for cultural artefacts during an invasion considered a war crime?

@@DJchilcott Soldiers gunning down citizens even if they're looting stuff is a war crime too. It was the Iraqi authorities who were supposed to be responsible for protecting their artifacts, instead they were the ones who sold it off

One of the crimes Saddam was charged over was his destruction of sites deemed "The heritage of mankind". He destroyed one of the oldest zigarruts in the world in order to build an airfield near it, as one example. The Saddam line mentioned here disturbed ancient sites as well. He wasn't convicted of it because they decided to speed things up and after he was convicted of 148 murders (A single incident), decided there was no point in continuing the trial and sentenced him to death by hanging. "conviction for the illegal killings of 148 Shi'ites in the town of Dujail in 1982."

ISIS intentionally destroys ancient ruins and artifacts all the time.

Are you sure the Russians haven't tried busting out some WW2 era battleships against Ukraine? Also, hasn't North Korea fire upon ships using WW2 era battleships which were gifted by the soviets?

@@lljkgktudjlrsmygilug the last Russian built battleships, Sovetskty Soyuz class, were scraped in 1940 mid production. The last battleship they had was the Italian Giullio Cesare which was given for war reparations and scraped in 1957. The oldest North Korean ships is a fugas class mine sweeper that was built in the 30's. Rest of the NK fleet are old 70's soviet frigates

Soviets never really had a battleship program after the revolution. They are mostly known for submarines

Pretty crazy how useless the A10 is. Gun's highly inaccurate, it has piss poor awareness, super suseptible to SAMs and shoulder mounted rockets. The F-111 got more confirmed kills with half the sorties. The A10 also has the honor of being the aircraft with the most Blue on Blue incidents of any US ground attack aircraft in the last 50 years. To the point the British asked the US to stop using it in Afghanistan due to the sheer number of times British soldiers and vehicles were accidentally hit by A10 pilots.

The US is horrendous at dealing with insurgencies, but when it comes to conventional warfare they are ten thousand leagues above everyone else.

@@rockmycd1319 To be fair, everybody is horrible in dealing with insurgencies. Even the Taliban is bad at it

@@aaroncabatingan5238 The Taliban sucks at it because they're dealing with a desertion crisis in which their own fighters are joining the IS-K since they don't view the Taliban as being fascist enough.

Ah, I see another LazerPig enjoyer. Welcome to The A-10 Sucks club.

Well, free elections, which would probably have resulted in regime change in most areas.

People actually revolted after Saddam lost Kuwait,partly because Bush Sr. encouraged them to. Then the US proceeded to fuck them over by allowing regime planes and helicopters to gun down protesters and genocided marsh arabs

I will call it Imperialist because that is exactly what it is. Calling yourself a leftist while supporting the Iraq War requires a whole lot of cognitive dissonance

@@ObiJohnKenobi22 Who said that I supported the Iraq war? International law is all about vibe checks and what the UN is willing to enforce. The war happened in the way that it did because Bush Jr's justifications for Iraq failed those checks and the UN failed to act according to its own principles twice. The international community had the moral authority to remove Saddam as part of Desert Storm. By leaving the issue for over 20 years, that moral authority was lost. My position is that removing Hussain was the right thing to have done in 1990, not in 2003.

I dunno if every movie says “war bad” and have that be the end of it. It depends on the war the media is showing. Most WW2 films and TV shows ultimately show WW2 as a war worth fighting, something that any reasonable person agrees with, but nevertheless demonstrate the horrific things that happen so that people are not “excited” to want another war. As for movies set in Vietnam and the Middle East, the actions and message of those movies depend heavily on the film-maker’s political leanings. It’s a range from anti-war to pro-hero narrative/America good guys.

It is itself bad, but sometimes there are no avenues to good but through bad.

y are u saying this about a video regarding the gulf war

"War is the greatest plague that can affect humanity; it destroys religion, it destroys states, it destroys families. Any scourge is preferable to it." - Martin Luther, German priest, theologian, author, hymnwriter, and professor.

There's the moral quality of each conflict and then there is War in general. Individual conflicts can be justified, righteous, even necessary. But War is bad for everyone involved, and especially all those caught in the middle. They pay the highest price.

People don't seem to understand that NATO isn't at all interested in "fighting" a war. They're interested in *winning* one.

@@RaptorJesus Precisely.

@@caesarplaysgames I always think it's hilarious when I see vatniks and other such sorts say shit like "yeah well if America/NATO would do a *real* fight, without their precious airpower, then they'd see who's best!" They're so confident when they say it, blissfully unware of how much of a self-own it is. Because really, it's just them saying "we don't stand a chance unless you literally handicap yourself".

@@RaptorJesuscomparing nato forces to Russia pre Ukraine war still put the Russians at a disadvantage

Abrams tanks, no cover, no support, outnumbered direly; utterly obliterated every T-72 that ambushed them without taking a single casualty.

Imagine waking up and your boss has amassed that alliance bc "reasons"

Image the second time it happens. Like your dad gets wiped out in golf storm…then the Americans are invading again… man.

"You won the war! How'd you do it?!" "I PUSHED G-12! It was in the catalog!"

Thank you airplanes!

They just weren't used to advancing in the first place.

this joke is so boring

@@leaveme3559 Don't be too hard on them, their education system is so bad they don't have the intellectual hability to think of other jokes.

Yea but France had Charlemagne and Nepoleon so W as far as I'm concerned.

@@Serpillard "hability"

The issue with unguided RPGs was always range. Having to get within like 500 ft of the enemy is enough to fill anybodies pants. Also, there is very rarly only one tank. It was never a good solution. The Javelin in some cases outranges the tanks it is designed to destroy.

Javelins are guided top-down munitions which means they can be guided toward the target and upon flying above the target the charge detonates. The reason it often absolutely annihilates Soviet tanks is due to a fundamental design flaw with their autoloading system underneath the turret which offers no protection to the tank or crew. (Also the reason you see turrets fly high up into the air after being hit in the ammunition)

jesse what the hell are you talkin about

My cousin came back from Desert Storm, he was never the same…..3 years later he blew his brains out

Oh boo fucking hoo.

The Finns got some Pervitin too.

If you look at the percentage of our budget that goes to the military, our defense budget isn't *that* big. Sure, in total amount of money it's the largest on the planet several times on. But as a % of our entire government budget? If memory serves we're actually on the lower end of that spectrum.

It did. We just couldn't occupy Iraq

Justice. Like how Bush Jr saw Saddam as the dude behind 9/11 despite all those Saudis on the airplanes that destroyed the twin towers? Saddam would've gotten Gaffadi'd eventually, but he had no WMD. Where's the justice for Bush Jr?

Well the former is absolutely a worse way to die

I mean it’s obvious why

Personally, if my options were either to slowly asphyxiate under sand or to be instantly evaporated by artillary, you bet your ass id be standing in the middle of a field waiting for a missile to blow me away

I agree that I’d rather be vaporised by artillery; but that’s often not how artillery works

@@jordanclark4635 Yeah, the shrapnel will tear a person to shred first and said person would spend the next few hours bleeding to death

I mean it did clean up on the way in. The Iraq military was wiped out rapidly and easily with minimal losses.

03 was probably even easier considering they had basically neutralised the entire Iraqi army in Iraq within 3 weeks lol

@@shelovinthecrew well sure, the initial invasion was a similar success, but I meant the occupation and how different it ended up being fighting against insurgents

@@Opno oh yeah but we’re talking about something completely different there being an occupying force is hard bc you’re generally facing up agaisnt an overtly hostile population unless you plan on initiating some totalitarian regime it will always be difficult

@@shelovinthecrew yeah, that's what I mean. It's interesting to see how well the tactics and equipment performed during a shock and awe invasion where you smash and get out, compared to how poorly essentially the same military did at handling an occupation with a complex political situation and a ton of civilian collateral.

are you actually not from the West? that comment just sounds like an American pretending to not be such in order to justify American exceptionalism

@@avinashreji60 no, I've found that Americans don't speak English as well as I do. Then again, I went to private school. Not on board with American exceptionalism, but a fight for socialism necessitates some degree of violence given the antagonism native to the struggle. Intervention is necessary and I'd rather have it done by a country that can conceivably be controlled by the people than one where the people are very much an afterthought. I'm not talking about espionage and subterfuge as needed in regime change. I'm talking about overt acts like sanctions - >full scale military intervention if needs be. All I'm saying Is that if American socialists were in charge, things like Afghanistan would have gone a lot better.

@@varun009 most American lefties are not in favor of any kind of intervention by the US at all

@@varun009 Iraq would have gone much better too. Not that the war would happen in the first place haha.

@@MegaBanne Socialists would have let Kuiwat get annexed?

NATO strikes things with military utility. They don't engage in pure terror-bombing. On the other hand, Russia regularly strikes apartments and other purely-civilian targets. Civilian casualties in NATO attacks are an unavoidable side effect, for Russia that's the whole point.