The new old war in Korea

[Jester]

Where the US or anyone has trouble is when the politicians get in the way of kicking butt, or when an insurgent opponent is intermingled into the general population where indiscriminate butt kicking leads to support for the insurgency.

Those are two very different problems. One means you have to let the military off the leash to blow crap up on their own terms.

The second means fighting a different war in a different way, where the US's big "advantages" of a high-tech, high-firepower military, are potential liabilities. Fixing that problem is decidedly not the same as finding a balance between overwhelming and insufficient force. It's a a matter of developing a correct strategic understanding of the situation, and adapting tactics and even overall philosophy to solve the problem at hand, rather than the problem they might wish was at hand. The US' biggest problems (so it seems to me) have always been found there - fighting the wrong war, or fighting the right war in the wrong way.

-Jester