Are there other examples from history where the world has seen versions of endless war?
I mean, you said no war is literally endless. We know that.
But what are some other examples from history that we can mirror if this is the direction Russia-Ukraine is going that we can look at to see what does it look like?
What does it look like for those countries, for those populations from a tactics standpoint?
Yeah, well, the idea of never-ending war really has been used a lot more in the aftermath of nine eleven.
It’s often applied to the global war on terror, which is kind of an abstract objective.
But actually, if you look at the Cold War, a couple of conflicts that immediately come to mind that I imagine our viewers probably have already anticipated.
The first one, you know, America’s involvement in Vietnam.
It’s kind of a textbook example of a forever war.
There wasn’t really a front line, so to speak.
There wasn’t a specific objective.
It was more or less stopping the spread of communism in Southeast Asia, propping up South Vietnam.
And if you look at the military statistics from that war, there was really no doubt whatsoever that the casualty figures were very lopsided.
You know, the Tet Offensive is often held up as a watershed moment in that conflict.
But if you actually look at what was achieved, it was very, strategically, it was very little, but the perception it created was that the war was essentially unwinnable.
The US was never in any danger of complete defeat, but simply had no way to force its will on North Vietnam so long as they were willing to stick it out.
That conflict, if we include the earlier conflict with the French, lasted twenty years.
They were in it for the long haul in the United States just to have the means to achieve victory militarily, but was never, as I say, in any danger of losing.
Similarly, the Russian intervention on Afghanistan from nineteen seventy nine to nineteen eighty nine.
It’s another good example of that.
Russia’s involvement was limited.
It was only over the Fortieth Army that was deployed to Afghanistan.
Now they took a very deliberate, brutal approach to pacifying the region, but they were never able to.
Again, it wasn’t a case of capture the enemy’s capital or destroy the enemy’s army because they would be attacked by irregular forces.
They would then melt away again.
No matter how brutal the reprisals, they kept coming back.
Gorbachev called it a bleeding wound and just wanted to pull out in the end.
And then we saw the US-led coalition, which was in the same country a few years later, which was a very low-intensity conflict.
But again, there was no way of achieving victory there through military means.
Propping up the government in Kabul proved to be very ineffective.
And after twenty years, whatever progress had been made was undone almost immediately.
Again, we’ve talked about the war on terror.
The ongoing Russian intervention in Syria has been going on for, I believe, eleven or twelve years now with very little to show for it.
So those are kind of the characteristics or examples of what’s called never-ending or forever wars.
Is there another element here?
I don’t know if this will hold true for all of the examples that you talked about, but is there an example of sort of proxy war, other countries’ support behind the scenes that seems to be extending these never-ending wars in some cases?
Is there like an Iran backing militias in one country that allows that conflict to continue, or in the case of the Ukraine-Russia, Western nations backing Ukraine?
Is there a proxy or a support element that allows these to continue longer than they otherwise would?
Yeah, that’s actually one of the keys to counterinsurgency warfare is isolating the nation that’s involved.
So one of the very, very few examples of success was the British intervention in Malaya in the nineteen fifties.
That was a very long-term project.
And what they were able to do was isolate the supply of outside forces.
Again, it took a very long time, took a lot of political will.
But yeah, outside support can prop up resistance for years indefinitely.
So yeah, that’s an important point to consider.
