Quote:
Originally Posted by Ducimus
How much longer are we going to ride on the coattails of our forebears trying to bask in something that our generations had nothing to do with?
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That's an interesting statement, interesting because I concur and disagree at the same time. Conflicting...
I agree because the usual putdown from the US to anyone in Europe is "We won the war" or in particularly to the Allies "You would not have won the war without us." Of course this is equally right or wrong depending upon your view, the war would have ended, yes, but the whole of Europe would be in the Comintern. Some more right leaning people might argue it's there anyway, but I digress.
I disagree with you because there are still generations today, on this forum, who stood at the Fulda Gap and prevented the Soviet Union from doing something stupid, jsut as there were Soviets on the other side preventing us from being overconfident. Balance of power, something that has pretty much no meaning now the Cold war is over. Those people, who may have considered themselves in the arse end of the cold war, did a lot for the people of West Berlin who could have been shut down by the Soviets any time they wanted but for fear of military retaliation.
Post Cold War though, aside from KFOR, the US has remained out of European conflicts, primarily because at the moment there are none. If the time comes again and we do go into another conflict in Europe, will the US get involved again? Probably, yes, but like the Second World War and First World War, it will probably need a bit of spurring on to do so.
On the original topic at hand, it's a tricky one to rule on. The US is designed to fight a ground war, however it's not designed to fight one outside of Europe because with the exception of the Pacific theatre, that's where most of Americas most successful wars have been, and the United States forces spent sixty years preparing for war in the Fulda gap. The same could well be said for the British Armed Forces, although we had some previous experiences of the Middle East since we owned several parts of it once, and in hindsight really should not have let them go...
It's a new era of warfare and we're only just beginning to adapt to it, which doubtless means that when the next era of warfare arrives (be it with China or whoever) we'll be caught off guard and need to adapt to that drumbeat.