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And Our Flag Was Not There: A History of the Second American Civil War.

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Dab master said:
We absolutely could not do the Iraq War today.

We can hardly keep the Army staffed and we ran out of munitions to give Ukraine. We already robbed the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and we've alienated the core recruitment base of the US Army.
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I think this is overstating the case. The staffing problem is because of the senate forcing stupid fit-for-duty rules on the military, and it's far from out of munitions. The strategic petroleum reserve is down but still over half of what it was before they started dipping into it a year ago.

Honestly I think the military is actually a lot farther ahead of most armies than we suspect, partially because maintaining a high tech, professional fighting force is actually way harder than most people assume. Most armies are either a bunch of trash conscripts organized around a so-so praetorian guard unit, or just a bunch of bureaucrats sitting in bases doing corruption.
Dab master said:
If Iran lets Gaza get deleted they would lose any legitimacy outside there borders, and this is an absolutely golden opportunity to normalize with Arab nations. Plus, I get the feeling that people in the region are smelling blood in the water in response to the slowness and incoherency of the Israeli-American response.
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Supposedly Palestine is not actually that popular among Iranians because it's become sort of regime coded?
 
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the atom said:
I think this is overstating the case. The staffing problem is because of the senate forcing stupid fit-for-duty rules on the military, and it's far from out of munitions. The strategic petroleum reserve is down but still over half of what it was before they started dipping into it a year ago.

Honestly I think the military is actually a lot farther ahead of most armies than we suspect, partially because maintaining a high tech, professional fighting force is actually way harder than most people assume. Most armies are either a bunch of trash conscripts organized around a so-so praetorian guard unit, or just a bunch of bureaucrats sitting in bases doing corruption.

Supposedly Palestine is not actually that popular among Iranians because it's become sort of regime coded?
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Actually military experts think different.

The US took six months to organize the logistics for Operation Iraqi Freedom. Arab states giving us basing rights for the sake of helping Israel complete the Nakba with even more human brutality would face constant terror attacks.

A lot of Iran's forward force disposition is in groups like the Houthis and Hezbollah and Hezbollah already beat the IDF twice before. Iraq is also filled with militia groups who hate the continued American presence and Syria is filled with well-armed militants who hate the illegal American occupation of oil fields. The Houthis and Palestinians have already survived genocide by our proxies, what more could you do to them?

In any case the US recruitment problem is actually pretty bone deep. Frankly US leadership is now suspicious of the group that is the primary recruitment base, Red Meat Americans.

In a conventional war I think the US would literally do better against Russia (flat land and superior intelligence) vs Iran (all mountains and much less hubris).
 
the atom said:
I think this is overstating the case. The staffing problem is because of the senate forcing stupid fit-for-duty rules on the military, and it's far from out of munitions. The strategic petroleum reserve is down but still over half of what it was before they started dipping into it a year ago.
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Wokeness is ruining our militaries ability to recruitment.

Literally.

Everyone is too awake about how shit being in the military is and nobody wants to join.

You can get a waiver for most "fit to join" stuff, and they can always find a pog mos to shove you in if you're a little too physically disabled to be battlefield worthy, or they can just ignore that and send you in anyways because who cares it's the military.

The problem is, it fucking sucks to join. Being in the military sucks, it's benefits are nice *once you get out* but you have to deal with more than half a decade or life full of endless bullshit to get there that you might as well just go to college and start paying off those loans now.

Social media just innundates kids with veterans like me endlessly bitching about how much it fucking sucks, and we aren't even in a major war! Iraq and Afghanistan veterans have been bitching publicly about how they were just sent over to secure oil, mineral rights, and defend opium fields while getting shot at by a populace that *did not want them*.

That phrase "nobody wants to work anymore" that people that want to ignore how absolutely inadequate minimum wage is is actually relevant when talking about the military because *nobody wants to enlist anymore*.

Don't even get me started on the navy that is the branch I was actually in and has a systemic problem of sailors falling asleep at the wheel and ramming into other ships and boats at sea!

The only way the military could get the youth these days to join the military to go fight an unjustified forever hell war in Israel these days would be with a draft.
 
Dab master said:
Actually military experts think different.

The US took six months to organize the logistics for Operation Iraqi Freedom. Arab states giving us basing rights for the sake of helping Israel complete the Nakba with even more human brutality would face constant terror attacks.

A lot of Iran's forward force disposition is in groups like the Houthis and Hezbollah and Hezbollah already beat the IDF twice before. Iraq is also filled with militia groups who hate the continued American presence and Syria is filled with well-armed militants who hate the illegal American occupation of oil fields. The Houthis and Palestinians have already survived genocide by our proxies, what more could you do to them?

In any case the US recruitment problem is actually pretty bone deep. Frankly US leadership is now suspicious of the group that is the primary recruitment base, Red Meat Americans.

In a conventional war I think the US would literally do better against Russia (flat land and superior intelligence) vs Iran (all mountains and much less hubris).
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Oh for the record I don't think the U.S. could go in on Iran at all. Syria and Iraq on the other hand aren't in good condition to try anything and I'm skeptical they'd even risk it. The militias might but that's far from an existential threat to CENTCOM.
yeastmobile said:
You can get a waiver for most "fit to join" stuff, and they can always find a pog mos to shove you in if you're a little too physically disabled to be battlefield worthy, or they can just ignore that and send you in anyways because who cares it's the military.
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Not anymore you can't

Nonetheless, fudging medical histories has been a key step on many troops' path from applicant to recruit, according to a group of active-duty military recruiters who spoke with Military Times for this story.

"What it takes to get in the Army is, quite frankly, a lot of fraud and perjury," one recruiter said.

But this tacit tradition — technically a crime — largely stopped in 2022, the same year the military's recruiting numbers fell precipitously and today's recruiting crisis came to the fore.

That year, the Defense Department brought a new medical records platform, known as Military Health System Genesis, online at Military Entrance Processing Stations, where applicants are medically examined before they can sign up.
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yeastmobile said:
Don't even get me started on the navy that is the branch I was actually in and has a systemic problem of sailors falling asleep at the wheel and ramming into other ships and boats at sea!
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That sounds like a problem with the sailors being overworked.

Like, "be able to drive the boat" is fairly basic, and these are ships with crews of hundreds, so picking someone who's not sleepy to be in charge of Not Smacking Into Anything should be relatively easy. Either they're not training enough helmsmen and so on, or they're just overworking everyone until anyone they pick is sleepy.
 
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yeastmobile said:
Huh they started cracking down on that stuff in 2022. Very neat. Still doesn't explain the "recruitment crisis" headlines that were on display before 2022 though.
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Were there recruitment crisis headlines in 2021? I guess I could see COVID and the Afghanistan withdrawal being part of the issue but the recruiters don't seem to think that's when the problem started
 
I think you are ignoring the fact that willingness to fight, bravery, is actually important.

Take Israel and Ukraine in contrast. Ukrainians, whatever you want to say about their politics, actually do fight in incredibly horrifying and shockingly deadly confrontations, you cannot doubt their bravery.

The IDF is legitimately impaired in Lebanon and now their dithering in invading Gaza by their aversion to casualties.

The US Army and public are very casualty averse. When bases in Syria and Iraq start getting smothered in rockets, missiles, drones, and shells political will will collapse. We didn't actually take terribly many casualties in Iraq compared to even Vietnam but it was enough. The Iraqi resistance fighters didn't have to destroy tank columns or anything so flashy.
 
Simon_Jester said:
That sounds like a problem with the sailors being overworked.

Like, "be able to drive the boat" is fairly basic, and these are ships with crews of hundreds, so picking someone who's not sleepy to be in charge of Not Smacking Into Anything should be relatively easy. Either they're not training enough helmsmen and so on, or they're just overworking everyone until anyone they pick is sleepy.
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Yeah that's what I was saying all USN sailors are heavily overworked and are falling asleep on shift because of it. Technically they have "enough" people trained to be helmsmen, but your job as a sailor is never *just* what you are on watch for but also other shit like maintenance. But I was just an overworked electrician who knows maybe helmsmen are just lazy lol
 
the atom said:
Were there recruitment crisis headlines in 2021? I guess I could see COVID and the Afghanistan withdrawal being part of the issue but the recruiters don't seem to think that's when the problem started
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There have been recruitment shortfalls since 2012, it only got worse every year since then. The only reason we didn't see much before then is because of massive boosts from 9/11 and a willingness to drop standards for recruitment down to "this man has a pulse". Once Congress and other groups started making them have actual standards, and veterans started talking about how shit it was, the numbers went down.
 
Dab master said:
I think you are ignoring the fact that willingness to fight, bravery, is actually important.

Take Israel and Ukraine in contrast. Ukrainians, whatever you want to say about their politics, actually do fight in incredibly horrifying and shockingly deadly confrontations, you cannot doubt their bravery.

The IDF is legitimately impaired in Lebanon and now their dithering in invading Gaza by their aversion to casualties.

The US Army and public are very casualty averse. When bases in Syria and Iraq start getting smothered in rockets, missiles, drones, and shells political will will collapse. We didn't actually take terribly many casualties in Iraq compared to even Vietnam but it was enough. The Iraqi resistance fighters didn't have to destroy tank columns or anything so flashy.
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The thing to remember is that it took years for the US to get truly tired of Iraq and demand a pullout, and even more years to get truly tired of Afghanistan.

I think what did it in both those countries, and for that matter in Vietnam, wasn't the death toll. It was the duration. The perception that this war had been going on for so long that it could keep on going forever, that the puppet government would never grow a pair and stand up on its own properly, that fathers could serve in this war and live to see their sons or God forbid grandsons serve in it, endlessly, to no lasting purpose, building nothing that wouldn't collapse the minute they turned away from it.

All for nothing.

I'm honestly not sure the American public would actually freak out about a war in which they were losing soldiers at the same rate as in Vietnam (several thousand a year) or even higher, IF they thought the war served a useful purpose and there was a reasonable hope of victory. Conversely, the total number of casualties in Afghanistan to all combat causes probably being on about the same level as the casualties the military suffers just from vehicle accidents alone wasn't enough to keep Americans happy with a war that was obviously unwinnable in the long run.

I'm not saying that the US's network of basing and troops in the Middle East couldn't be overrun or that nothing bad would happen to it in the event of a general Middle Eastern war.

But I also don't think the US populace would freak out and demand that we sue for peace in the first 90-180 days of such a war because of "casualty aversion" alone.
 
I mean to be clear I think it is good Americans don't want to die to defend Israel of all places. I would be ashamed of my country if they did, and this timeline is, in part, a love letter to Americans if not the United States itself.
 
Dab master said:
I mean to be clear I think it is good Americans don't want to die to defend Israel of all places. I would be ashamed of my country if they did, and this timeline is, in part, a love letter to Americans if not the United States itself.
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I get what you're trying to say but to be fair we are overwhelmingly okay with sending them infinite weapons to do the killing for us
 
Let me explain how the federal budget works.

So money is appropriated by the House of Representatives. The House of Representatives is made up of representatives from districts designed to be proportional to the population of the state.

So for example, the least populated state, Wyoming, has one representative, while the most populated state, California, has 52.

The budget (the money appropriated by the House of Representatives) is written by a committee of the United States House called the "House Budget Committee".
 
Bisexual-Mart said:
Let me explain how the federal budget works.

So money is appropriated by the House of Representatives. The House of Representatives is made up of representatives from districts designed to be proportional to the population of the state.

So for example, the least populated state, Wyoming, has one representative, while the most populated state, California, has 52.

The budget (the money appropriated by the House of Representatives) is written by a committee of the United States House called the "House Budget Committee".
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What's your point?
 
Basically, the House Budget Committee writes the federal budget. If enough people on the House Budget Committee want to delay military funding to Israel, it could happen.
 
Dab master said:
I mean to be clear I think it is good Americans don't want to die to defend Israel of all places. I would be ashamed of my country if they did, and this timeline is, in part, a love letter to Americans if not the United States itself.
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Okay, well, just all of that aside because Israel v Palestine is a horrific mess...

There's a difference between opposing a war because "too many casualties," and opposing a war because "this war is a terrible idea even if effectively zero of our dudes get killed in it."

Recent US history has mostly been one repeat after another of the latter. Mistaking the latter for the former results in a great exaggeration of likely US sensitivity to military casualties. We bail out of wars because they're stupid and eventually the public realizes they're stupid, not because the public feels like too many people have died.
 
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Back on topic please.
  • Staff Post
    • This thread is not the place to discuss the real America's wars, the Israel/Palestine issue in general or the presently active conflict there, real world economics, or the intricacies of the United State's government and how it handles funds. Please take any such discussion to either News and Politics, Warfare, or Active Conflicts as appropriate.
     
  • Staff Post
    • Dab master said:
    I know at least one mod reads this timeline.

    Amusing considering it brings more cringe everyday that this is the work of mine on this website that gets the most attention.

    My own work in it I should say. All the contributors who aren't me did good jobs.
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    Well. Because A): this TL is daring enough to show both sides of flaws and failures alongside the realism in depicting 2ACW, and B): a much needed boost to the Current Pol TLs in the aftermath of controversies and a sockpuppet incident in PolChat that resulted in Current Pol TLs popularity nearly collapsing and forced newer TLs to Test Threads instead.
     
    Dab master said:
    I know at least one mod reads this timeline.

    Amusing considering it brings more cringe everyday that this is the work of mine on this website that gets the most attention.

    My own work in it I should say. All the contributors who aren't me did good jobs.
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    idk whether to take that as a dig against ppl who got into the timeline thru shots fired or not. :p

    Like yeah sure it's hardly how the conflict would likely play out irl simply bcuz it acts too much under the assumption that online is real life (altho I think the degree to which it isn't is exaggerated by centrist pundits who want to discount the significance of increasing radicalization on the left) but it has a certain feeling of hyperreality to it, in being one of the few works I've seen that captures the sheer absurdity of the dramas of our times while not downplaying their human toll (the only comparable thing I can think of is southland tales)
     
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