Has the US ever known how to fight on mostly equal footing? Serious question. Thinking over if there’s ever been a time it could be argued it fought on such a level and won.
I think this might be the first time that US is facing a peer competitor, and it’s not going well.
IMO the American revolutionary war, 1812, and the civil war counted as “equal footing” wars. But that leaves almost 200 years since the last experience. Ever since then, the US has never really experienced the proper taste of war- mainly, they’ve just experienced inflicting it on others. Even in the world wars they were largely untouched.
1812 was on equal footing but i doubt they got much experience beyond a deep understanding of how to get their asses kicked.
Why wouldn’t you count the world wars?
In both world wars the USA enjoyed much larger industrial capacity (which was never under any serious thread) and fleet power (multiple times that of the entire axis) against its enemies. Not to forget the excellent continental island position the US is in. The Empire of Japan was ground to dust, with much of its army not able to face the US because of the invasion of China. In Europe the US faced depleted armies, the USSR received most military attention of the european axis powers.
In WW1 the US only joined when the central powers were already depleted.
Can we call wars where the US mainland was completely untouched and its foes had no means of doing so “equal footing?” Not to mention the US arrived late to both wars, facing off a Germany that more than had its hands full (and was facing severe resource shortages) both times, and a Japan that was suffering severe resource shortages and had most of its military focused on China…
You could probably make a case for the Spanish-American war. But Spain never really had its heart set on winning, and did not wage full scale war.
Spain by then had nowhere the industrial capacity to withstand the US. Nor the armies, fleets or financial power.
I recognise that the US was on the rise, and Spain was in decline. I had difficulty finding the actual military sizes, but from what sources I could find, their troop sizes were more or less equal on paper. How that translates to the real world, I’m really not sure of. But it seems clear that Spain had a lot of internal troubles and bad luck with disease.
But my understanding is also that it wasn’t until after world war 1 that the US began building their MIC. At the time of the Spanish American war, the US was still a bit of a backwater. When they entered the great war a few years later, they were not an effective fighting force and had to borrow a lot of French equipment in order to be useful.
It’s not an area of history that I am intimately familiar with, and I’m genuinely not trying to claim that they were equals. I’m just highlighting it as a possibility. And it was still well over a century ago, so it doesn’t disagree the point at all.
Not since Vietnam. And much of that also was not on equal footing.
So maybe Korea is a better example. But neither the DPRK nor PRC had much in the way of an Airforce.
Then it’s propably WW2, in which the USSR did most of the fighting. And the Axis airforce being depleted already from fighting the brits and USSR when the Yanks made landfall in Europe. Once could argue that Japan was a peer force back then, but that would ignore the discrepancy in industrial capacity and fleet strength in which the US overshadowed the Empire of Japan at all times. It would also have to ignore the fact that most of the IJA was bound fighting in China and not against the Yanks in the pacific.
CLearly not WW1, the US joined the fray in 1917 against the depleted central powers.
Honestly, the last time was propably 1821 and it ended with the White House getting burned down.
The US only knows how to win against weaker opponents, and even then, they lose sometimes.
“insurgents”
the words they choose to demonize resistance to the US-led invasions.
The veteran said that a lot of foreign fighters have come to Ukraine expecting the same advantages they have had in previous conflicts and that many have been killed as a result of having the “wrong mindset.”
