The remarks differ from what Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is said to have told the president in high-level White House meetings.
President Trump said on Monday that Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, believed that any eventual military action ordered against Iran would be “something easily won.”
But that is not what General Caine has told Mr. Trump and other senior advisers in recent high-level White House meetings on Iran, people briefed on internal administration deliberations said.
Instead, General Caine has said that the United States has amassed forces in the Middle East to carry out a small or medium strike, but that there would be a potentially high risk of American casualties and that such an operation would have a negative effect on U.S. weapon stockpiles. General Caine has also underscored that the operations under consideration in Iran would be much more difficult than the successful capture last month of President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela.
Was so heavily propagandized and subjected to so little scrutiny that it’s likely impossible to know whether it was actually successful by any objective criteria.
Was famously two DECADES of achieving absolutely nothing and then retreating, ending in a decisive victory for the Taliban, who are in charge again.
The situation for anyone opposing them is identical to before the US invasion AT BEST, and the US (and allies) lost FSM knows how many soldiers, civilians, and billions of dollars on that abominable quagmire.
As far as colossal military failures go, it’s arguably somewhere between the US interference in the Vietnam civil war and Hitler’s invasion of the USSR.
From a military standpoint, the US military did not fail its tasks. It’s the political side that’s a failure
But in real life, it’s impossible to decouple purely military objectives from political ones.
Afghanistan was nowhere near the scale of either of those two fiascos, and the Vietnam war was far smaller in scale than the USSR/Nazi war.
Vietnam war: US plus SVNA military deaths: 282k. VC: about 500k. Civilians: also about 500k.
USSR v Nazis: Easily 20 times those numbers.
That’s the “the operation was a success, the patient died” of wars 🙄
Pyrrhic victory.
I never claimed otherwise
My point is that the military is inherently political, so it doesn’t exist sense to say that the military performed admirably and the politicians ruined it.
The military leadership ARE politicians.