A US veteran in Ukraine said the US has not been sufficiently training for war with a near-peer or peer-level adversary, like Russia or China.
      • dinklesplein [any, he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
        20·
        2 months ago

        saying the US ‘barely participated’ in WW2 is pretty egregious, just because the USSR did the majority of heavy lifting and very much could have won by itself doesn’t mean that’s what happened.

        the majority of post-normandy heer formations deployed in the western front were the best equipped ones, the western front was denser than the eastern front and lend lease was large enough in scale to certainly have made a material difference. that doesn’t mean that the US won the war by itself, or that the american sacrifice was anything comparable, but this sort of revisionism comes off as pretty crankish tbh.

        • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆@lemmygrad.mlOPEnglish
          11·
          2 months ago

          I recommend reading this book produced by US military, it makes it pretty clear that allies played a minor role in the war overall

          a few quotes from it

          • 小莱卡@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
            5·
            2 months ago

            “Communist ideology, which tends to equate human achievement with industrial production and emphasizes the effect of production on history, prompted the Soviets to seek victory in the factory. In this endeavor, they enjoyed astonishing success under very difficult circumstances.”

            An US military wrote this !? i am mind-blown that this was published 😳 😳 😳

      • freagle@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
        18·
        2 months ago

        I feel like the US just rolled the Iraqi armed forces and it became an insurgency in minutes. Maybe that’s just time compression in my memory though

        • TreadOnMe [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
          17·
          2 months ago

          It would have been much worse if the Iraqi Army had stood and fought. Lots of stories came out from guys at the front who would roll up in Humvees on heavily armoured outposts that were straight up abandoned, where they say there would have been a massacre of us troops if the have stayed. It was such a ubiquitous experience that even ‘Generation Kill’ has it happen to the protagonists. There was really only one large engagement, and the U.S. Marines absolutely wiped a bunch of Iraqi tanks that were out in the desert, many of whom didn’t even get a shot off. All other stuff ended up being insurgency, much of which at the beginning were local militia forces.

          What Generation Kill doesn’t get into is the theory that the Iraqi commanders and some of the actual troops had been paid off, and also given promises of leniency, which immediately fell through when all former members of the Baathist party were banned from holding government jobs, which put pretty much all the best and brightest of Iraq (including the entire officer corp, most of whom had survived the war) into the position of having to resort to gangsterism (in this form jihadi militia work) to survive in post-war Iraq. While it does make sense that the army wouldn’t really want to fight naturally, the rapidity and professionalism of general insurgency only really took off after the Baathists were put completely out of power and points to a broken agreement imo.

        • GenderIsOpSec [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
          10·
          2 months ago

          i think they mention in Blowback season 1 that pretty much all of the army were either bought off or deserted on their own, taking their guns with them mind you. only in Baghdad there was some serious resistance by the elite Republican Guard.