Let's talk about Iraq first. Iraqi forces were able to occupy numerous Iranian lands in 1980 despite being a mediocre military force at the time. Iran is much larger than Iraq and not a pushover in its own lands. Not surprisingly, Iran was able to turn the tide of this war in 1982 and put Iraq on the defensive; Iranian navy also destroyed Iraqi navy during this time.
It's not useless. You are not understanding. To validate concepts and TTPs, you do not necessarily need to fight against opponents of similar power, the experience found even against weak opponents is a great approach to validating the doctrine and consequently your own weapons. In this sense, the Americans have a large advantage against the PLA, which has no real experience since 1970 and would not even know how its entire combat system would react in a real war, because exercises do not validate this under any circumstances.
The most interesting thing about this is knowing that the PLA military is using doctrines from manuals that American generals wrote, most notably the USMC manuals on amphibious campaigns.
you forget to consider one thing.
USA fight half way over the world against rag tag militia , countries that are sanctioned for 10 years and in those 10 years their military is destroyed systematically .
Fair points, but Iraq had put together a much better military force in 1988 in comparison to what it had in 1980. So US-led coalition was up against a new Iraqi military force to which the entire Middle East had no counter at the time as I have explained at length in previous post. Arabs looked at all options but decided that US is the only country that could stop Iraq in 1991.
Seems you have no idea what you are talking about. Ukraine was a sht hole military the only western weapons it had at start of war were javelins, stingers and Hummer-vehicles and that's it. Everything else in their military arsenal was Soviet era. Ukraine at the time was just as bad as Russia when it came to corruption.
That's not entirely correct. During the Vietnam War,there were fierce battles between the US forces and the NVA which was in pretty good shape and equipped with Soviet and Chinese weapons,apart from captured French and American equipment. Most of the time,the US forces were vastly outnumbered. Yet.they managed to prevail either because of heavy support from the Air Force or by their tactics and skill. The US didn't lose the war,they withdrew because of Carter.
Chinese and just about everyone that brings up Vietnam as a loss forgets that Operation Linebacker 2 brought the North to its knees and to the negotiating table in which they agreed to a ceasefire which allowed the US to pull out all COMBAT troops from the South and allowed South Vietnam army, which was huge in size and well armed to defend their own country, but as soon as all US combat troops pulled out the north broke ceasefire and South Vietman army and people didn't want to fight... just like Afghanistan.
Operation Linebacker II in 1972 was so effective that it took Vietcong 3 years to recover from its blows and capture the South in 1975. However, Nixon had made the decision to withdraw American troops earlier in 1971 and did not change his stance on the issue. However, if the US had continued for like 2 more years, it would have won the war absolutely. This is admitted in American records. But this war did not appeal to American people for some reason.
Let's also not forget that McArthur insisted the US drop a few atomic bombs on China to keep them out of the conflict,but he was replaced.
