Comments by "SmallSpoonBrigade" (@SmallSpoonBrigade) on "4 Reasons Nobody is Joining the Military" video.

That's good to hear. They really should be questioning it. A ridiculous amount of the military activity over the last 40 years in particular has been mopping up the messes of the CIA going in and arming questionable groups because it was convenient at the time. The US literally armed and trained Osama Bin Laden during the '80s to go after the Soviets in Afghanistan. Not to mention that we were the ones that supported Saddam Hussein in Iraq as a counter to the Ayatollah in Iran, even as Hussein was committing genocide internally. And the Ayatollah was only in power because we decided to overthrow their government when we didn't like the government that they chose after chasing the Shah out. It's a recurring theme and don't even get me started on Cuba.
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The shameful part was that we sent troops in there for 20 years and couldn't even secure the roads from the nearest airport to the embassy. What we accomplished there could have been done purely with cruise missiles. The only reason it went on for decades was that we were paying one side to fight with the Taliban. It would not have collapsed so quickly if there were any iota of desire of the people to be free of the Taliban. At least on a scale large enough to matter.
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Considering that by the end the new enlistees weren't even old enough to have existed in a world where we weren't at war there, it does raise some questions about why they were even signing up in the first place. Neither the DOD nor the politicians have cared enough about really any conflict since WWII to send in the numbers of troops necessary to win decisively, unless it was a tiny country. And win, lose or draw, a large chunk of those actions were either not useful or were actively harmful to our interests or the interest of global peace.
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@kaijuslayer3334 Probably because of the military base that they have and don't want.
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@thomassimmer5186 It wouldn't have worked. The people there didn't want what we were selling. Literally the only reason why there was a war there at all was that we were paying for one side to keep fighting. Having married into an Iranian family, I can tell you that these sorts of cultural beliefs can be incredibly durable to the point where my in laws refuse to acknowledge what a bad idea it would be for us to send the military into Iran to reinstate the Shah, again. I do not doubt that the Afghans have similarly strong cultural beliefs that doom most efforts to bring a new government to them. They will, eventually, move towards a form of governance that's less authoritarian and tied to religion, but that has to happen from within. Even the German people that wanted a western style democracy need around 70 years and 2 world wars before they had one that was stable.
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@shaan702 Absolutely, WWII was completely unwinnable without the Soviets and they paid a high price in blood in doing so. Had Hitler not engaged in that attempted take over of the USSR before he solidified his position in Europe, we might well have seen a world where the Nazis controlled virtually everything. But that's hard to say, but it likely wouldn't have been easy with so much of the developed world under Nazi control.
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Here's an idea, perhaps scale back the BS missions to places where the US has no business and focus on things that actually increase national security. Actually have the resources in place to support the personnel as they reenter civilian life. And, perhaps, stop being so disrespectful to potential recruits. I still remember the shameful and disrespectful comments made by the naval recruiters as they tried to gaslight me into enlisting. It's not a great way to encourage people to enlist if you have to start by verbally abusing and gaslighting the people that you've chosen to contact. I wound up not enlisting, in large part due to how BS the wars that were ongoing when I was still young enough to consider doing so. I did wind up working security at one of the buildings that was on the original list when they were planning 9/11 though, go figure. These days, there are just a lot of other options for people that want to protect their country, but not engage in the sort of questionable operations that the DoD has become fond of. I can't imagine anybody with integrity seeing Abu Ghraib and being like, I want to joint that organization. And possibly even less so when they didn't go all the way up the chain and get everybody that led to that failure for something.
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@mattwong5403 Except that's clearly not the case when the generals are this incompetent. We've known since Vietnam, and probably earlier, that you cannot win a war on foreign soil without the support of the local population, and you cannot get that support if you're not protecting them from the enemy. 2 opposing armies having at it is not going to guarantee that the locals will take a particular side. We failed in Afghanistan and Iraq because there was never any serious intention of protecting the local population from being annihilated by the enemy. There were never enough actual personnel on the ground to do the job, nor was there any interest in drafting more to make it so. Ultimately, Iraq has fared somewhat better, but mostly because the Shia were able to slaughter enough Sunni to reduce the internal strife, which is probably not what the people planning the invasion were expecting as they didn't do anything at any point to prevent or address it. In Afghanistan, the fall was swift in large part because we were paying one side to fight with the Taliban and that was the only reason they were fighting. They didn't particularly want what we wanted them to want. At least not in numbers large enough to field a large enough military to stop the Taliban from seizing control almost immediately. The best trained military in the world should have competent people from top to bottom and the US military definitely does not, the higher you go, the less competent you're talking. Most of the conflicts we've been embroiled with over the last couple decades are the direct result of incompetence at the DOD and our intelligence agencies.
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