American Analysis: We Cannot Depend on Shake & Bake Foreign Soldiers

Food for thought

We Cannot Depend on Shake & Bake Foreign Soldiers

“My fellow citizens of the world... ask not what America will do
for you, but what together we can do for the Freedom of Man.”

John F. Kennedy, Inaugural Address (20 January 1961).

American soldiers are the best in the world. They are well-trained and equipped, and they are standup men and women. We tend to train and equip foreign forces fighting alongside our troops, but we do not really test them on the battlefield. We count their troops as a total number when only a fraction is battle-ready.

We will send American troops to other countries in the future, and we will again train local forces to prop democratic governments. We cannot allow all democracies in the world to be overrun by totalitarian forces, and China will continue to pursue the creation of a Chinese-dominated totalitarian world government. Nevertheless, future American military interventions need to establish three basic principles:

first, the nation that we go to defend must draft all available men to be trained and equipped for battle, and the created Indigenous military force must relentlessly pursue and destroy its enemy, albeit with American air power and general support.
Second, we should never allow American troops to fight in a war against an enemy that hides in a sanctuary. It is never a winning strategy, and it should never be allowed.
Third, we should never send troops abroad unless we intend to win and have a well-defined exit strategy.

In the Vietnam War, we created a South Vietnamese military of over a million men, but we never had them confront the North Vietnamese Army head-on. Yes, they had their major battles, but they never tried to close the Ho Chi Minh Trail. We pursued the same foolhardy approach in the 20-year war in Afghanistan. We created an Afghan force of 300,000 men, trained and equipped by us, but it was not used to expel the Taliban from all its territory. We should have used the Afghan army to both relentlessly attack Taliban forces inside their country and to conduct raids into their sanctuaries in Pakistan. After we create an indigenous fighting force in a protected country, and they face and defeat their enemy head-on, albeit with American air power and support, we can begin our orderly withdrawal.

The real questions are, why did the U.S. allow the existence of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, an enemy supply jungle highway in the Vietnam War? And why did the U.S. allow the occupation of part of the Afghan territory by the Taliban while the Afghan Shake-and-Bake army watched from afar? Our shake-and-bake foreign armies will always postpone the final battle for tomorrow if we allow it if we accept a war of attrition, and the result will always be predictable.