What if America Won a War and No One Cared?

And have a Happy New Year SFC.

Maj Kevin "Mac" McLaughlin - In your honor my New Year's resolution will be to continue to fight the ignorance of people who think we have any form of a real victory in the fight against ISIS.

Head on out there for all I care. I'm done with you.

Maj Kevin "Mac" McLaughlin - No you are not, if you were done you wouldn't respond.

SN Ron Jett - This post was about winning a war......my comments are to the effect that the "war" with ISIS is not over. We did a great job of confronting them in Iraq/Syria......and winning that fight. As for Trump.....he allowed the generals to conduct the effort there......and that worked well. Good for him......but the fight isn't over, any more than the fight in Iraq was over when Bush made his famous "Mission Accomplished" speech on the ship.

The article speaks of winning a war in Iraq and we did in fact facilitate this. Especially when that host nation is even saying ISIS is defeated in their country. Victory was achieved in Iraq in 91 as well. Kuwait was liberated as per the objective of the coalition forces. It is possible for wars to start up again. As for the "Mission Accomplished," speech this was an over-politicized stunt to discredit the President. The sign was clearly meant for the returning members of the USS Lincoln. The members of the ship asked the WH if it could be made for them to congratulate their return after the longest deployment ever by a nuclear powered carrier. Bush himself never uttered those words during the speech and in fact stated:

"We have difficult work to do in Iraq. We are bringing order to parts of that country that remain dangerous. Our mission continues...The War on Terror continues, yet it is not endless. We do not know the day of final victory, but we have seen the turning of the tide."

The article above is not suggesting the war is over against terrorism either. But a victory has been attained and we helped facilitate that. For now in Iraq, that war is over. This also isn't to say there aren't smaller factions of ISIS roaming around. But they are leaderless, unorganized, and out of resources in Iraq. I hope it stays that way. Thanks should be directed to President Trump for enabling our military to be more aggressive in the region.

Maj Kevin "Mac" McLaughlin - He started that speech by saying that "major combat operations have ended. In the battle of Iraq, we and our allies have prevailed." In reality, we defeated their army......but were totally unprepared to fill the void left by a defeated army and government......leaving the country in total chaos......and necessitating keeping combat troops there for many years after. We succeeded in routing their army and toppling their government........but we were far from ending anything when he staged his carrier landing and victory speech. IMHO, our troops performed in a magnificent fashion.......but our leadership and planning were lacking. Leadership under Obama was lacking as well. He tried to accomplish our goals by heavy use of drones......which are effective in many ways, but you can't rely on them to win a war. It takes full on combat to do that. Trump got out of the general's way and let them get aggressive, and that is a good thing. But a lot remains to be done to accomplish our ultimate goal.

Major combat operations did end. Bush was 100% correct. Now with that said, I have no idea what your background is or what you’ve done in the military. A significant portion of my career included military planning. One of the cool things about communications is that we’re in everyone’s shit and we have to be a part of some of the most critical areas of contingency planning. I’ve been a part of COCOM level contingency planning efforts for several of their most anticipated operations. I was also there for part of the Iraqi Freedom planning and I watched how they initially built out each of the phases. Phase IV (transition operations) for any plan is ALWAYS the most difficult and hardest to anticipate what will happen. Essentially we are trying to predict the future and the conduct of what the original enemy will do and what third party organizations will do. Now, we can arm chair the crap out of it after the fact, but the truth is, no one knew how much of an insurgency effort enabled by outside forces would actually happen. Still, we adapted and adjusted our forces to take on this threat and me made great progress getting it under control. That is until President Obama felt he had to ignore his military leaders and make good early on a campaign promise. In comes Trump who not only promised to take the fight to them, but he has enabled his military leaders to do just that, without Washington in their way. That is what I’m speaking to when it comes to this article and how we should give him credit. Furthermore, this effort has enabled Iraq to harden their security efforts and keep ISIS in check. That was the objective of our surge in military personnel in Iraq and Syria and to that end, he has won. Now, we still have to wait and see if the Iraqis can follow through, but the same can be said for any nation we gone to war with in the past.

That's funny, I didn't see them push them out of Iraq.