War of attrition almost certainly requires high continual casualty numbers, it's literally in the first sentence of the Wikipedia article:
> Attrition warfare is a military strategy consisting of belligerent attempts to win a war by wearing down the enemy to the point of collapse through continuous losses in personnel and materiel.
I live in the rust belt. No one is buying those 30k homes. Why? They're unmaintained, falling apart, need completely rewired, completely new plumbing. The housing stock in the rust belt is OLD. This is what makes prices "so cheap" to you lot looking in from the coasts.
But the reality is no one is buying the discount properties that need major work. They're in run down neighborhoods with vacancies everywhere and sit on the market for months. They're almost unsellable - many are held onto with the hope that a neighborhood will get gentrified. Cities like Detroit and Cleveland see Pittsburgh's resurgence and think that will happen there. But for every expensive Pittsburgh neighborhood there's a Clairton and McKeesport.
Sure, you could buy a house in the extremely small cities of Ohio with little to no jobs or economic future. I doubt many are. Almost all the population growth in the US is in major metro areas. If those cities are close to commute to Cleveland, Columbus, or Cincinnati, sure.
Pandemic restrictions are pretty much nonexistent in large swaths of the US that have similar problems.
There is certainly a worker deficit. Our society has moved up the stack and isn't bringing in enough cheap immigrant labor anymore to work the jobs even poor americans won't accept anymore.
Seeing these comparisons is frustrating and makes it easy to understand why Afghanistan continues to be an enigma to westerners who think they know and understand the realities there on the ground.
Because US is hegemon and can essentially do as it pleases without immediate consequence. This is why Russia and China have been focusing on destabilizing the US and minor geopolitical moves to chip away as opposed to directly challenging US authority.
It's interesting that the system working as intended is now viewed as a negative.
Is this not capitalism at work? Company provides what society needs. Right now only 2 companies provide this particular type of vaccine. More competition will come in, driving down costs.
This is just it - most people criticize the media have a clear political agenda, it oozes out of them. In this case, it immediately goes to Trump and Russia, almost instantly, almost as if it's a campaign. It misleads by saying "we don't have direct evidence of this, therefore it must not have happened." The two articles linked are not convincing.
Often times people complain about the mainstream media and then post their own media, without convincing me why I should trust this media over any other media.
Is that not problematic? You make an extraordinary claim, but then "there is no time for me to back it up." But there was time to make the claim, and this is ultimately the problem. You have just accepted out of hand that it is truth and want others to accept it.
Why should I trust anything you say, then? I don't doubt that there are biases, they're certainly are. But you're expecting us to just accept it out of hand.
That's because the problem isn't media literacy, it's culture war. Both sides believe that they are fighting a do or die battle for their ideology, and are likely to support something even if the evidence is dubious because it advances the cause.
Institutions have some level of accountability that Facebook memes don't.
The NYT is not an arbiter of truth. However I am much more likely to pay attention to a piece of journalism from them moreso than my neighbor who can't read saying vaccines are just microchips. At the very least there is a credibility factor that they have.
The US has always had biased media - people forget the famous newspapers of the federalists and the republicans as early as the birth of our country - however at times it was able to align with certain truths between factions. It seems this is what was really lost.
Journalism has taken a huge hit in this country and the effects are widespread. I'm not against hearing an argument for something. I am against hearing an argument based on an unsubstantiated rumor and "we don't know if it's true but WHAT IF IT IS true" reporting that exists today.
I don't see how history can judge him harshly. Of course there is no way of knowing.
But this is what everyone wants. No one wants to fight this war anymore, it's unwinnable, and staying any longer will just delay the inevitable. I think history will look harshly upon the instigators of this war than the ones who decided enough was enough.
On top of that, the conquered nations were not failed states. The US had a vested interest in protecting western Europe from the soviets, and given the historical and philosophical similarities and background of western Europe to the US, this was rather doable.
Even the US policy towards Japan was rather shrewd.
It's unlikely to see Afghanistan become anymore than what it is regardless of foreign intervention. They don't have the same recent history. It's similar to a Somalia than a Vietnam.
The US never committed to total war in Vietnam, likely because of consequences from the USSR and China.
Just because harsh agents were used doesn't mean the US couldn't have been harsher. They certainly could have been.
> It's also hard to justify "total war" when your sovereignty/existence is not at stake and you're effectively an interloper in other people's conflicts.
Yes, that's my point - so instead you end up in 20 year zombie wars that bleed over time and accomplish little.
This was inevitable. Better to let it happen now than continue to waste resources on a hopeless conflict.
A great example of the failure of modern war. The inability of the military to effectively execute total war because of public palatability leads to these outcomes - zombie wars that can never be won, because no one has the stomach to do/say what actually needs to be done.
It's hard not to think about the military industrial complex in all of this - a long term war wasting millions on equipment, supplies, energy, with relatively minimal cost to lives compared to total war, is an ideal money maker.
War of attrition almost certainly requires high continual casualty numbers, it's literally in the first sentence of the Wikipedia article:
> Attrition warfare is a military strategy consisting of belligerent attempts to win a war by wearing down the enemy to the point of collapse through continuous losses in personnel and materiel.