Frankly, I have always wondered why the U.S. defeated the Japanese but did not beat the Vietnamese years later in Vietnam.? Its time we face this question head-on.

In WW2, the Germans and Japanese clearly started the war with land grabs and direct attacks on military forces guarding there territories. Clearly, they were in the wrong. However, land grabs can take place in a more subtle way as we are seeing in Iraq by the U.S. originally saying the invasion was for self-defense against possible Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) but when these were not found over-staying their welcome and occupying Iraq no doubt to gain oil and have bases to further attack Islamic nation-states the Bush administration does not like. In a way, if Germany and Japan had not continued land grabbing after taking China and parts of Europe there may not have been a world war, and they would have kept these territories as long as the populations there did not evict them eventually. If however, the Bushies continue to invade and occupy other countries resentment will build within the countries of the local citizenry being violated and outside them in the community of nation-states and a world war may result with the U.S. as the aggressor "bad guy". In WW2, there was a moral clarity that the Germans and Japanese were in the wrong and had to be defeated. If they were not defeated they posed a dire threat to us. I'm going to discuss in broad terms what it took to defeat the Axis powers in WW2 for lessons we can learn today to better our military but I do so with one huge caveat, we cannot have an excellent military without a MORAL COMPASS. If all we do is build an efficient military but without an ability to refuse immoral missions/wars, all we will have is the WW2 German military that did Hitler's bidding in modern garb/weaponry.

In Korea the cause was just but our military's ability severely lacking due to post WW2 victory hubris. In Vietnam, the cause was unfortunately unjust because we did not have a South Vietnamese government worthy of perpetuating due to internal corruption/oppression we instigated and tolerated. Our military was also lacking but had some good adaptations that held off the external North Vietnamese Army and suppressed the internal Viet Cong rebels as long as we were there to do this, from 1965 to 1973. When we left, the corrupt South Vietnamese government could not gain the dedicated support of the populace and field effective forces adequate to ward off the NVA from unifying the country by force in 1975. Our delaying actions in Vietnam did blunt any generalized communist social movement expansions into Thailand, so all was not for naught.

The key reality in my mind is that in WW2 the Americans "cheated" in that because neither they nor the Japanese lived on the islands and had a large population of sympathetic civilians to sustain them with intelligence/food, whoever ruled the airs and sea could interdict the other's supplies and wear them down through, lack of reinforcements, replacement parts, weaken/kill them by food starvation and a lack of ammunition. Most of the time the islands were uninhabited. When they were like in the Phillipines, the populace were definitely pro-Americans set to liberate them from the Japanese. In other words, air/sea supply/logistical domination could turn "the battle against the earth" forces against the other to a decisive effect. Basically we beat the Japanese the same way Sherman and Grant defeated the south: by starving the Lee and the confederacy into submission, which you will see was done by sea blockades around them and naval blockade/encirclement using the Mississippi river. In WW2 it was seaplanes, submarines and land and sea-based aircraft that did the majority of the logistical destruction of the enemy's supply ships not the Union blockade and Sherman's men finishing the job on land by destroying rail lines and burning graineries. Even as far back as 1860, we had Winfield Scott "getting it" yet, less than 100 hundred years later we would not get it with disastrous results in Korea and Vietnam. I think WW2 "victory disease" played a big hand in this over confidence.

What was really dangerous about WW2's aftermath is that this HUGE situational circumstance was not appreciated and Americans smugly assumed their jungle fighting abilities were all they needed to be. Later conflicts on the asian mainland that were not battles on islands surrounded by water easily interdicted resulted in U.S. forces having to fight asian armies feed troops by their society's baby machines and frankly, we fought Korea to a draw and lost in Vietnam.

When I say "lost" we need to realize war is not some sort of "duel" or sporting contest where the actual fighting settles the entire issue in typical European mindsets. War is about whose WILL dominates, whose ideas and political/social outcomes prevail. As Sun Tzu and MacArthur warned what matters in war is this VICTORY not prolonged operations, however brilliantly executed.

In both Korea and Vietnam, U.S. forces could not interdict the asian enemies and starve them as we fought them. This should have come as a "wake up" call to improve upon our WW2 methodologies but sadly they did not.

What should have occured and still has yet to occur in the American military is to create a warfare style that places our troops in the most logistically frugal way of life so we can be like Sherman's flying columns in the Civil War, and at same time has a way to isolate the enemy from his support bases of the land and people to starve/weaken them. In American military thinking--if you can call what we do having some logical basis, there is no realization that the FIRST battle in war is against the earth itself to survive and stay alive with food, water and shelter. At any time these things are supplied human beings can die just as lights out, its over suddenness as a bullet or a bayonet because life here is science fiction not a cowboy with straw in his mouth western. The earth is moving at 66, 000 miles per hour through the universe and has immense forces of cold, heat and weather taking place on its surface not fully mitigated by our current suppressive atmosphere, which can burn up incoming meteors but does not stop the sun constantly stirring up rain, snow, heat and cold. When humans stop civilian lives which incidentally are completely dedicated to defeating the forces of the earth whether we admit to it or not, and start fighting each other we if we are not careful expose ourselves to death and disease from the hostile germs, weather and exposure of the earth itself.

The U.S. military, NOT drawing upon our best and brightest minds nor most enterprising is composed of weak co-dependants and narcissistic egomaniacs who do not think about anything, they came to the military life to NOT THINK, to have everything prescribed to them in set formulas to relieve their personal anxieties about life and to make them feel like successes by lording it over others within a pyramid of existentialist rank and quasi-achievements. In a word, we do not have a PROFESSIONAL U.S. military, we have a bunch of amateurs that play at war when they come up who spend the majority of their time playing garrison games.

We have proposed a breakthrough system of living for ground warfare that overcomes the Battle Against the Earth and demolishes the garrison building lawn care and parade ground bullshit using sea/air/land ISO containers as self-sufficient "Battle Boxes". Battle Boxes would purge the U.S. military from the current garrison building distractions and absurd tent cities lived in overseas and would lick the Battle against the Earth up front concerns our own troops would have while providing a secure encampment from enemy fires. To logistically isolate our enemies further, we will need the ability to control ground and peoples with ground MANEUVER and not just hope we have water surrounding our enemies that we can blockade with ships and planes. The U.S. military is NOT good at ground maneuver due to the aforementioned "amateur hour".

Much of WW2 "victory disease" was egotistical; Americans took their victories in both Europe and the Pacific as proof that the American fighting man was superior to both the Jap and the Heinie. This smug, narcissistic illusion does not hold up to the facts when examined in detail. If the U.S. had not been able to starve Japan because her troops were on easily interdicted islands, and starve Germany of oil because she was without oil reserves and deeply inland its doubtful that we would have beaten either at all or as quickly (5 years) as we did. Germany/Japan started their WW2 land grabs because of their lack of natural resources, meaning whatever they took could not be held because there was no civil populations living on these resources that would insure they could keep these resources, in fact there were hostile populations living on these newly aquired lands in many cases.

However, looking beyond the hugely important Battle against the Earth factors, we must see that the myth of American battle against other humans superiority does not hold up. America in WW2 was the "baby machine" that could mass mobilize and produce lots of 18-21 year olds that could be handed a M1 Garand semi-automatic rifle with 8 shots to swarm over the Germans and Japs with bolt-action rifles and less of a population base. The Japs could not produce very good tracked tanks, so in the Pacific our M4 Sherman medium tanks, and amphibious armored personnel tractors (AMTRACKS) would give us a technotactical edge of having bunker-busting and flamethrowing and some personnel carrying. In Europe, the Germans made far better tanks than we did and when we failed to produce heavier tanks to counter their heavier, defensive tanks we lost thousands of medium Shermans that were designed to support infantry after a breakthrough enemy lines was effected. We swarmed the thousands of Sherman tanks we had by filling these easy to operate vehicles with our baby machine people and overcame the Germans who were weakened in the far east by the Russians doing the same with mass-produced T34 medium tanks and submachine gun armed foot troops. Above the ground, mass-produced and easy to operate fighter-bombers from the west (USA and England) and east (Russia) and mass produced cargo ships and warships can be accurately seen as defining a "ww2 way of war". WW2 = mass produced, simple to operate but holding a slight technotactical advantage armaments. For example, the P-51 was and is a great piston-engined fighter-bomber but against a German Me262 JET it was at a severe disadvantage. However, 3,000+ P-51s will beat less than 100 Me262s actually placed into action.

What happened after WW2 was and is very troubling. America went to sleep and stopped developing war weapons for ground warfare and the enemy did not. Our new Russian communist enemies upgunned their T34s with an 85mm gun and began a series of mass produced but increasingly superior at the platform versus platform level of war tanks. They created the "AK47" a selective fire automatic rifle with a 30 shot magazine. They perfected the rocket propelled grenade launcher to blast bunkers and smash tanks. Both in Korea and Vietnam, we were found fighting the enemy at a DISADVANTAGE who could not be conveniently starved into submission. The pattern was repeated again and again, American troops on foot would bump into the enemy if on the move or be attacked by the enemy if in the defense. We would desperately "circle our wagons" and call in air and artillery strikes to ward off the enemy we could not defeat M16 versus AK47s and RPGs. We later on in Vietnam found some equipments that could defeat the enemy's AK47 & RPGs backed by some light and medium tanks: the M113 Gavin light tracked, armored personnel carrier, all-terrain, amphibious and air transportable "armored cavalry" for 2D maneuvers backed overhead with the "air cavalry" in fixed and rotary wing aircraft that could observe/attack and transport troops for 3D maneuvers. Yet in the aftermath of Vietnam, the American military driven by amateurs eager for the WW1 style narcissistic foot infantry default based on the WW2 American fighting man Hollywood movie mythology (John Wayne's "Sands of Iwo Jima" if you are a marine, "Band of Brothers" if you are Army). Do not dismiss Hollywood movies as entertainment when they are just as real at passing down social values and perceptions as telling stories around a tribal campfire. These are how societies pass on what they think they know, not by a few intellectuals studying things in detail with objective honesty.

We are still in the current post-WW2 doldrums of a military in the ground forces longing to relive WW2 badly--not even with all the implements--and without the mass mobilization to out-produce and swarm over our opponents and without the means to exert enough force on planet earth to isolate and starve out our foes either nation-state ones or sub-national terror groups. We do not have WW2 quantities and have not upped the QUALITY of the few forces we do have to make up the difference as the German Army had to do in WW2 and the Israelis and British armies have done in the post WW2 period. Without mass conscription armies to occupy large areas of the earth, the battlefield has become NON-LINEAR and without any front lines and "rear" areas for a huge underclass of Soldiers to simply get by resupplying an overclass of "combat" troops. Everybody had better work and fight on the NLB, and that means an end to the narcissistic snobbery that has corrupted the U.S. Army and marines in the first place.

There are two major theories of human warfare in conflict with each other right now, the "Revolutions in Military Affairs" (RMA) mentality of the Toffler's that humans can be defeated through mental gadgetry steering high explosives and the Van Crevaldian 4 generations of warfare that today the MIND of the people themselves is the key, and that the central problem is man's nature that likes to fight other humans. I see RMA as a physically emasculated version of WW2 without the mass production of platforms and troops based on feel good American labor saving laziness to "send a bullet not a man". We are deluding ourselves that absentee warfare with UAVs and ground robots sending us TV images and shooting expensive missiles is going (FIREPOWER) is going to win wars for us against people who live on the ground. RMA apologists will whine that UAVs "help" the war effort citing the few positive effects they can gain. What these people don't admit is that they have a responsibility for SOLVING THE WHOLE PROBLEM OF THE NON-LINEAR BATTLEFIELD, not just advance a pet project in disregard for everything else going on. When the USAF wants a couple $BILLION for a 100 armed Predator UAVs with a 50% crash rate this initiative becomes a defacto panacea and main effort when you realize we do not have ANY manned observation/attack fixed-wing aircraft patrolling the main supply routes of our troops on non-linear Iraq. The monies that we will lose playing with armed UAVs could and should field a literal Army Air Force of over 1, 000 "grasshopper" observation/attack planes that could literally have a qualitative decisive effect in Iraq, denying the enemy the ability to lay roadside bombs and sabotage oil pipelines. We are treating Iraq like its a giant science experiment and R&D exercise to some up with a new gadget that we exalt the human ego in a timeline of "progress". We are more intent on making a name for ourselves than winning the war for the people who need a victory on the ground to have decent lives. We have a moral responsibility to step back and look at the sum of all our actions in DoD and if you do that you will see that it is indeed reliving the flawed WW2 formula badly.

Summary/Conclusion

We won in WW2 by 3 major factors:

1. it was a Just Cause rallying civil populaces to help us
2. we were able to logistically isolate our enemies
3. Mass mobilization of people to become Soldiers and mass production of good-enough equipments to outnumber the enemy

In Korea we had factors 1 and 3 in our favor and we fought enemy to a draw. In Vietnam NONE of the 3 factors was in our favor and we lost. In Iraq today we have all 3 of these factors against us. If this is not proof positive that we need to shit-can the current "American Way of War" and to develop a professional force of thinking adults with high quality but simple weapons that what more disasters will it take?