Ask the Rhodesians and South Africans about that.

They were able, despite their racism, to turn illiterate peasant tribesmen, who often hadn’t seen electricity before joining the army, into effective soldiers.

It took longer, more repetition of certain things, and an understanding of the culture and ethnography, but it could in fact, be quite easily done.

You might not get an illiterate tribesman to become an SF comms SGT, but you could get him to be able to use the radio in an emergency, even without him understanding the theory, but just by making him memorize the practice.

And if you get one who is literate, then you can make an officer, which towards the end, the Rhodesians did, even going so far as to make a black officer a true equal, not a “Sepoy” officer.

The ability of the private soldier to handle complex equipment and the training thereof has little to do with their inherent characteristics, and a lot more to do with the amount of trust their leadership has in them. Crappy leaders don’t put any faith in their men’s ability to do things, and as a matter of self-fulfilling prophecy, then they don’t.

Yes, you’re going to run into issues with trying to train Afghan or Iraqi recruits with average IQ test scores in the mid-double digits, but that’s not the case even going back to the WWII era here in the West; we routinely trained people to do extremely complex things with multiple weapons systems without too much trouble, whenever we actually tried it. The First Special Service Force is an outstanding example–The majority of the US-sourced half of that force came out of various stockades, and was filled with malcontent troublemakers. Who promptly turned around and managed to blow every record for the conventional Army out of the water, when they were tested.

Most of the limitations imposed on training tasks come straight out of the imaginations of our officer class. From about 1982 through 2007, I observed a steady upgrade in complexity of equipment and operations across the entire Army, such that tasks and weapons which were only allotted to the SF community back in the 1980s were routinely being passed off to line units in the 2000s. Equipment that the “system” refused to hand off to us out on the line, like remote detonation systems for demolition, were being handled just fine by the line units whenever they deigned to give them to us. The average soldier in the armies that I’ve worked in or around is nowhere near as dumb or difficult to train as your post would have it.

I’d be happy to watch you or anyone else you chose try to figure out programming a SINCGARS radio using an ANCD at three in the morning on the side of a hill in Korea, after being up for three days. Average soldier could easily manage that, albeit with a bit of coaching. As far as task complexity, that’s just about as bad as it can get.

Truth be told, I think that we’re outrageously underestimating the capacity of the average person we put in uniform. Do the right sort of training, and they’re enormously capable, and always have been. Hell, even back in the old days when it was the old CEOI procedures for encryption of radio messages, people managed. And, that’s nowhere near as easy as someone with no experience of doing that would think it was.

By contrast your average special forces will train themselves on multiple weapon systems, often even if you try to stop them.

In the regular forces, you man the equipment, in special forces you equip the man, and that is exactly the correct way around.

Thanks for the clarification. I totally agree. I have read the Qur’an 3 times, the Hadiths twice, Umdat al-Salik Sharia jurisprudence and more. Islam is an infestation that has no place in the Western world or the world in general. The West should draw the ever popular red line around the middle east and get out followed by an explusion of all Muslims who came to the West in the last 20 years, citizen or not. Then the following public diplomatic communication should be made: If a single Islamic bomb goes off in the West we will MOAB Medina. If another Islamic bomb goes off in the West then the Kaaba will be next. As a demonstration of our firm will and policy a MOAB will be dropped on our bombing range. Diplomats and media are welcomed to attend the detonation on such and such date. This is our only and final communication on this matter.

Islam strikes at what it believes is our core value system. We should counter in the same fashion.

It is often done wrong. For example, the mom’s basement kids who cornered the market for COMBLOC ammo for the U.S., who won contracts as middleman and brokers of surplus despite the terms of the contract stating that brokered surplus was not acceptable.

Prince’s example of contracted helicopter support for Navy VERTREP is a good one, although I think his personnel footprint was a bit too small.

Up here in Canada, we have a rare success. Our at sea replenishment ships/oilers (HMCS Protecteur and HMCS Provider, rusted out. As usual, TPTB had dithered over replacement until it was too late.

There were/are plans for multi-role RO-RO ships that can act as supply ships and oilers, and as hospital and disaster relief platforms, and in a limited way as a mini assault ship in permissive environments or in conjunction with an allied task force.

The trouble is that the design of same is still going on, delayed by politics, mission creep, bureaucracy and all the usual procurement suspects.

The solution was the addition of re-fuelling masts and RAS gear to a leased off the shelf commercial container ship. It came in on time/on budget, and is in service as ab interim measure while the new ships are designed and built.

Since it is a commercial ship, it is operated as such, under contract, with a civilian crew, and a small Navy detachment to run the RAS and re-fuelling gear.

MV Asterix is providing excellent service, and if I were Emperor, we would procure and deploy MV Obelix and NV Dogmatix as well.

Not the US. The Democrats ‘lost the peace’.

Vietnam was when Communism was at the height of its near-religious appeal. Afghanistan is infested with Islam, and in neither case did the US military/political elites recognize that fact, or develop a meaningful strategy to counter the ideological aspects of the fight. Note the similar pattern of “achievement” for the Iraqi military, the Afghani forces, and the ARVN: We keep supporting and fielding the most inept and uncommitted, to fight those whose ideology is strong and appealing.

We’re not doing this right. Not at all–Which is what I’m getting at. No doubt there will be helicopters going from the embassy in Kabul out to the airfields at Bagram, and a final, messy retreat much like the British were forced into during their Afghan wars. And, it’ll be for the same reasons: We never attacked the Afghanis where it really counts, at the real center of gravity in this war–Which is the religion.

You want final victory in this war, you have to recognize the fact of the matter, that the primary enemy is Islam and Islam-inspired mental illness. Afghanistan was never, ever the real center of gravity: That was Pakistan, with the ISI and its predilection for Islamic irredentist insanity. The ISI thinks it can recapitulate the Mughal experience, and re-conquer all of India, in order to put the Hindu masses back where they belong, underneath Islamic feet. Ain’t happening–The resultant fight will go nuclear, and the subcontinent will likely be uninhabitable afterwards.

Ah, well… That’s the likely end-game, anyway. Wish all y’all the best of luck coping with it, because I’m done with it all.

I’ll acknowledge my lack of military acumen and details of history, but as I understand the Vietnam war it was a fiasco, but the US did not lose. After Johnsons escalation then on to Nixon adminstration the war was conducted by stateside REMF bureaucrats. Nixon took the decision making away from them and gave it to the generals in the field. An intense bombing campaign of North Vietnam ensued to the point that bomber pilots reported numerous instances of white surrender flags being displayed.The North eventually capitulated and agreed to a surrender treaty. Asian sensibilities aside concerning symbolic placement of tables and chairs, we basically bombed the shit out of them to get them to surrender. That is the how the war ended. The iconic photo of the helicopter evacuation of Saigon was in April 1975. The peace treaty was signed in January 1973. The fall of South Vietnam to the North was not a defeat in war, but a failure to have appropriate forces in place in South Vietnam after the January 1973 treaty. Imagine what would have happened in Germany or Japan had US/Allied forces just walked away. The US didn’t lose the war. The US ‘lost the peace’.

The French officer corps was a product of the same culture that created the Grandes Ecoles, and it was entirely and self-referentially delusional at its core. The German officer corps was dramatically different and far more attuned to reality–One should not forget that it was a junior French officer who wrote up a pamphlet outlining what became the basis for most modern small unit tactics, which was published, then ignored by the French hierarchy. A copy was captured by the Germans during a trench raid, and then… The Germans wound up enacting most of his system.

Frankly, I don’t think there’s anything that could have saved the French in 1940. They were so far behind the power curve with regards to the necessities for modern war, in terms of tactics and organization, that it was basically irrecoverable. And, despite the evidence of Poland before them, they were completely unaware of their internal inadequacies.

The Germans, by contrast, had massive issues in Poland. They identified them, were completely open and honest about them, and then implemented the necessary fixes in order to fix them. When the invasion of France began, they were so far in advance of the French in terms of operational technique and tactics that it was like snatching candy from a baby. Didn’t help the French, either, that the Germans were hopped up and hyped up on Pervitin, which enabled them to maintain an utterly unprecedented operations tempo, as well as having it heighten their aggression.

France was self-screwed, to be quite honest. Nearly everyone was, until they figured out solid counters to the German improvements, which really took until about ’43.