Re" the woke generals" DU vets chime in please.

[DemocratSinceBirth]

MAGA makes the argument that we don't win wars anymore. That's not the fault of the generals. In our wars we killed a lot more of them than than they killed of us and took and held ground. That's all you can ask. We didn't win because the leaders who sent them to war had poorly defined end games. Nothing to do with woke.

[Ping Tung]

1. They should stick to repeating the Glorious Victories in Grenada and Panama.

Violence is the last resort of the incompetent. Isaac Asimov

USMC 1961 - 1965

[DemocratSinceBirth]

3. I would argue Gulf War One and the liberation of Kosovo went well.

[AltairIV]

4. Not quite

Iraq is still a mess so I beg to differ.

[DemocratSinceBirth]

5. That's the fruit of Gulf War ll.

The goal of Gulf War l was to evict Saddam from Kuwait and it succeeded.

[AltairIV]

6. Yeah Iran was just thrilled to death with our success

If leaving a power vacuum and an open invitation for insurgents to come.and set up shop is a success I stand corrected.

[DemocratSinceBirth]

7. The insurgents came after the second Gulf War.

The principle that internationally recognized boundaries can't be changed by force is worth upholding whether the victim is South Korea, Kuwait, or Ukraine. The world is an awful enough place, it would be even more awful if bully nations can just annex weaker nations just because they can.

[Dennis Donovan]

2. You have to have the support of the people and a stable government in order to consider a war "won"

The way we fought in Iraq, with Blackwater and Abu Ghraib, wasn't forgotten in Afghanistan 15 years later.

[C0RI0LANUS]

8. The US military won the last time Congress declared war against a foreign nation (the Axis Powers in Dec 1941).

Every conflict our brave young men and women participated, fought, and died in after 1945 were not Congressionally-declared states of war but police actions, UN support in Korea, or counter-insurgencies under the oft-abused Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF).

Nevertheless. minorities and LGBT warriors fought with unheralded distinction in US military campaigns (Congressionally-declared or AUMF).

"Woke" is a MacGuffin concept-- a chimera-- that has nothing to do with battlefield resolve or clearly defined end states for sending the flower of our Nation's youth to faraway places to fight and die while the military-industrial complex executives rack up Mammon-like profits from the safety of their living rooms.

To wit, below are "Buffalo Soldiers" who fought during the 1898 Spanish-American War:




Chester Alan “Gavin” Arthur III — the grandson and last living descendent of POTUS Chester A. Arthur-- served in World War II in the US Army and Merchant Marine. He became active in the early gay liberation movement and a leader of the Haight-Ashbury counterculture.



When General Eisenhower wanted to purge the WACs of lesbians, his staff-member Nell “Johnnie” Phelps warned him her own name would be at the top of the list. On hearing Phelp’s declaration, Eisenhower’s own secretary came out as well, saying Phelps would have to make room on the purge list for her too. Ike quickly dropped the plan.


And as for "woke" generals, General George Washington's great drill-master who trained the Colonial Army was rumored to be gay. One of Washington’s last acts as general was a letter written to the Prussian signifying “in the strongest terms my entire [praise and approval] of your conduct.”


A portrait of Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben by Charles Willson Peale.