the German occupation of France and the Low Countries for a few years during World War II,
Let us not forget the earlier German occupation of Czechoslovakia and Poland, the latter being the trigger for Britain declaring war on Germany in 1939 when its demand that Germany withdraw its forces was not complied with.
To avoid confusion, I note that the US did not enter the war until December 7, 1941 when Japan attacked the US without warning, followed by Germany declaring war on the US.
Maksutov:
That's the problem with this supernatural stuff, it doesn't really solve anything. It's a placeholder for ignorance.
Mayan Elephant:
Not only have I denounced the Big Lie, I have denounced the Big lie big lie.
Let us not forget the earlier German occupation of Czechoslovakia and Poland … .
Significant additions to the list. My knowledge of history in general is narrow and spotty, but I keep forgetting even what I did once know about Eastern Europe, despite having visited parts of it. It’s a weird blind spot in my mind.
Briefly, I think it could be said that Germany and Japan were successful “occupations,” while Iraq and Afghanistan were not.
Several factors could explain the differences: existing governmental organization—we essentially eliminated internal control structures in Iraq—and occupying force size being among them.
In planning, we talk about “winning the peace.” If Iraq was assessed to require ~300k troops, for Iran, winning the peace might require hundreds of thousands of troops up front to defeat the military capability, and maybe a million or more personnel to form a security apparatus over decades.
I don’t think the American public has the stomach for that kind of commitment.
One of my colleagues says you need to “kill their god” in order to declare permanent victory. Like Hirohito and the Nazi ideology.
It’s an oversimplified metaphor, but essentially he means victory requires defeating not only an enemy’s military forces but also the source of legitimacy that drives resistance.
I figure that when senior military planners get assigned the task of establishing some doctrine for something, they do that, and then whatever hypotheses emerge as consensus ideas circulate for years with all the authority of established fact.
There are a lot of complex technical procedures in military doctrine that really are well established as effective, having been learned the hard way over centuries, and having been updated continuously because one of the hard lessons learned over centuries is that you really have to stay up-to-date. But I think there are limits to how far that kind of military knowledge extends. It's unfortunate—and could be dangerous—if the respect with which solid military doctrine is treated gets extended to shakier notions, just because respect for hard-learned facts is the only attitude anyone knows how to take to official doctrine.
There has been a lot of real-world experience in fighting wars, even though there haven't actually been so many wars, because wars are made up of many battles, and the way that successful battles combine to make a won war is relatively straightforward. Large battles in turn are made up of many smaller engagements, and the way that these combine to win the whole battle is also a story that can be understood well, at least in hindsight. Even individual soldiers can be surveyed afterwards; if they survived their engagements, then they're still around, and they're on your side, and they're under orders—so you can find out from them how things worked, or did not, right down to details like how to make the rifle fire again when it jams.
Most of the important things that happen in battles are also pretty constant over time and across cultures. Ballistics is the same in all countries; human anatomy is the same; and the most basic aspects of human psychology, that determine whether people fight or retreat, are likewise the same. So an awful lot of all the stuff you learned from the last thousand battles is still going apply to the next one.
For tasks like occupying a defeated country, on the other hand, I don't think that anything like that volume of reliably relevant data is available. So I'm sure there's a bunch of doctrine about how occupation is supposed to be done, and I bet that it gets presented as authoritatively as squad tactics. I see a lot more danger, though, that the occupation doctrine is actually based on dubious extrapolation from a few very specific case studies that are unlikely to be representative of a general phenomenon. The next attempted occupation may not be much like the last three, at all.
