Regarding the Difficulty of "Winning" Counter-Insurgency Conflicts

The problem is the definition of "winning" in a COIN conflict; it's often neither conclusive, quick, nor politically appealing.

Vietnam was indeed a military victory, but was politically a complete rout - validating Clausewitz and thus invalidating everything the military actually accomplished.

The War Powers Act has historically been seen as a check on the power of the Executive, this is completely turned around in the modern era.  Since about 1947, there has been a tacit (if not explicit) collusion between the Congressional and Executive branches of government: the Congress will let the President deploy troops pretty much however he wants to with only a little public bleating, in exchange for his not demanding the War Powers Act.  They both win - he gets flexibility in policy, they don't ever have to take a public position on what he's doing.

I find this deeply broken, and leading not only to bad public and geopolitical policy, but bad for our soldiers.

Yes, FORCING Congress to pass a War Powers resolution before a CiC can deploy troops abroad would act as a check on the power of the President.  But it would also require consensus, and this means that the People would have to largely be behind it (for the cowards in Congress to crawl out from under their rocks and actually support it in the record).  FORCING such public and shared culpability means that if stuff goes sideways, we ALL have to recognize our parts in the choices being made.

To the original point, I submit that the "Lesson not learned" from Vietnam was clear; while our military has gotten even more crazy-proficient at what they do, and the force differential made the military victory even more foreordained, the failure was identical in 2003-2011 as it had been in  1961-1975: if you cannot sum up the goal of the conflict in two or three sentences (or ideally, one), you are going to be stuck there for a long time.

Part of a War Powers act MUST, therefore, include "Why are we fighting?" and "What conditions must be met to bring home our troops?"  Not 'most' of our troops.  Not 'pretty much all' of our troops.  ALL of them.  If the goal of 2003 had been "topple the Iraqi government" - pretty much everyone would have been fine with that.  In that case, our forces would have returned in 2004.  If it had been - as it turned out to be - "Topple the Iraqi government and rebuild it as a modern Liberal Democracy and then leave some bases in place to try to secure the security situation in the heart of the mideast with American forces for the indefinite future"....well, I think the public response would have been immediate, colorful, and probably used some very old Anglo-Saxon words.

To the OP: COIN conflicts are inevitable, with any non-peer opponent today.  Dealing with them REQUIRES competent politicians as much as generals, both at the front end and the back end.   Unfortunately as skilled as our troops are, our political leaders of both parties are far more capably incompetent.

Edit (addendum)

Yes, I'm aware that getting a War Powers act would be harder.  That is, I think, healthier.  It should be hard for a country to go to war.  REALLY hard.

Further, as much then as we'd share the blame if things go wrong as a result of issuing such, we ALSO would have to face the consequences of NOT doing anything which is often much worse.

Yes, this requires an actual 'adult' conversation about the situation (as complex as it may be) and the ramifications of doing something vs. doing nothing, and getting some sort of consensus out of a public more enamored with this weeks American Idol voting than issues of substance.  So be it.

The threat (?) of China

I doubt China would ever deliberately just "attack the US".  There's just nothing in it for them.

However, the odds that China ends up in a REGIONAL war that ends up with them fighting one of our allies (Taiwan, Japan, even India), and us getting sucked in are certainly uncomfortably greater than zero.

Then you have a Japan 1940 situation: an untested but arrogant and growing military power, clearly a regional power, trying to shoulder its way amongst other regional powers, but intelligent enough to understand that ultimately the guarantor of the status quo is the US.

Then what?

Then China's motivation becomes a game of poker; to what level must it raise the geopolitical ante, such that the US will walk away from the game?

THIS is the critical, one might say almost existential, question of the next 20-30 years between the US and China.  I fear it won't take longer to resolve than that.  Perhaps much less.

The calculus here is complex and not encouraging.
China is a burgeoning economic, demographic, exuberant 'growing' power.  The US is the pre-eminent military power bar none, but its economic system is a sham, its leaders (on both sides of the political fence) feeble, incompetent, and utterly self-interested.  The US public is lazy, apathetic, ignorant, and cheerfully distracted by TMZ.

On the other side, of course are a few critical questions:
- How much of China's economic clamour is real, and how much is Potemkin smoke and mirrors?
- China has severe demographic issues regarding gender balance, youth, and the growing bitter gulf between the haves and have-nots both within China and compared to the rest of the world.  These are only getting worse, and are amplified by a government that seemingly likes to toy with jingoism - neglecting the lessons of history that suggest in the long term it's something nearly as dangerous to the sponsor.
- Russia is a dangerous wildcard, remaining a revanchist proto-Soviet state under Putin.  Wide, empty, resource-rich spaces of Eastern Russia make this an extraordinarily sensitive spot for a Russian military already overstretched.  Russian ego-investment in their far-eastern districts is also not insignificant.  Their participation in any conflict would be opportunistic, aggressive, and extremely brittle.
- India, likewise, is extremely wary of a growing Chinese state lurking not-far-enough-away on the other side of the Himalayas.  The 'great game' West of Mongolia has been quiet since WW2, but it's been in play since the late 1800s and certainly isn't resolved yet.

All of these are a subtle confluence of varying factors; the reality of each doesn't even matter so much as the Chinese PERCEPTION of reality.  And this introduces what I think is the absolutely greatest wildcard: Chinese understanding (or lack thereof) of the US.

The US population is largely lazy, overweight, and apathetic.  Would an actual attack on the US be enough to rouse them from their torpor?  I honestly don't know, but I'm absolutely CERTAIN China has no clue.

What I fear is the habitual misunderstanding - and critically, underestimation - of US culture by others.  As much as any "foreigner" can fail to understand any culture (the US trying to understand China, for example) the US seems to regularly and particularly baffle outsiders, even people from relatively close cultural analogues as Germany, or France, much less China.

What I fear specifically is that the Chinese mandarins will, wearing the same blinders that Chinese have had for at least 2000 years, dismiss the US's potential response.  Like the belief in some quarters pre-GulfWar2 that the US "won't put up with casualties, ergo they won't get involved" - this both right and desperately, critically wrong.  The US public does habitually have an intolerance for suffering, no question.  But the lesson of history is that when enraged, we're capable of rationalizing and accepting staggering violence in the pursuit of "justice".  Even the relatively showy but strategically trivial attack of 9/11 motivated us to deploy our ground military for 10+ years WITH NO STRATEGIC GOAL.  Heck, we didn't even really use our air force or navy.

If there was an actual, direct attack on US citizens, I genuinely fear the response of the US public, and I'm not sure China does.  And in that inequality lies a terrible, terrible danger.

Apropos a conversation I'm having elsewhere:
I have no problem mocking religion, mine or anyone else's.  I think there's a LOT of humor-material in any religious creed and PERSONALLY, if someone is wound so tight that they can't laugh at themselves or their sacred cows (see what I did there?) that almost makes them MORE worthy as a target.

HOWEVER, if you're going to make fun of someone for something, and you deliberately choose to make fun of the person that you KNOW isn't going to react, that just makes you a wuss.

If you want to tell a 'challenging' religious joke in mixed company, fine.  But then 'pick on somoene your own size'; tell one that challenges the frothing fundamentalist standing right there who might take a swing at you, not the octogenarian lutheran lady that's just going to be uncomfortable but too polite to even say anything.

So yeah, make jokes about Christianity.  God gave us a sense of humor, after all.  Just don't be an intellectual coward about it.  (And REALLY don't then be a hypocrite and claim "that" certain indigenous faiths are 'protected' from mockery simply because they're brown people, that's just naked PC bs.)

I think Congress as an entire group should be impeached and removed from office.  Both parties, all members.  The GOP controls the House, they would lose that.  The Dems control the Senate, they lose that too.  This is not a partisan issue - it is a (lack of) competence issue.

The entire 'budget' dance since summer 2011 - the deal, the commission, sequestration - is all patently unconstitutional.

CONGRESS (you know, the people who control the purse strings) made a deal to
- set a small commission who would agree what would be cut.  OK, it's a farcically stupid idea with today's politicians but lets assume that it worked - Congress is VOLUNTARILY giving up its control as a body to a smaller body, selected not elected.
- if this commission couldn't decide, automatic broad cuts would take place.  Again, they are not fulfilling their jobs, they are simply mandating a mechanism that obviates their role entirely.

Sequestration is not "them doing their jobs, just badly" - it's not even that.  It is like your gardener (who has allowed your garden to become grossly overgrown with weeds) saying, "I really don't want to go through the hard, tedious, and painful work of sorting out the good plants from the bad, so I'm just going to cut EVERYTHING 6"."
From a gardener, it would be absolute incompetence.
From Congress, this should be criminal.


I grant that calling it unconstitutional may be overstepping.

The Constitution states that "...The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;..."  Conceded, it does not assert a method.

But if Congress took to paying our budget by pulling bingo balls and randomly allocating funds, I suspect we seek some recourse to impeach them for failing to conscientiously exercise the duty assigned to them.  What they are doing now is no better (and frankly, no more effective).

We need to punish incompetence in our politicians, not re-elect 90%.

The data seems to indicate that the gap between the 'have very muchs' and the 'have very littles' is growing. The "have just enoughs" have kind of been getting crushed.

Yet...this is invariably attributed today to the growth of rampant capitalism. Is that justified, or is that just a relationship pulled out of someone's backside because it "seems right"?

Were I to assess capitalism-ness as a metric, I'd say it's pretty clear that the USA in the late 19thC and early 20thC - the era of the rail barons, the Carnegies, the Vanderbilts, the Pullman strikes (1894), the Triangle Shirtwaist fire (1911), etc. - was a society far more "nakedly capitalistic", unfettered by government oversight or regulation. Further, the sheer growth of government since that time, the 1929 crash, the New Deal, WW's I and II, the War on Poverty, the Great Society Programs, etc. would suggest that capitalism has been if not receding, than at least mitigated strongly by regulation, government instutions and, honestly, public expectation.

My point is that the growing disparity in incomes between the top and bottom has paralleled the ebbing of capitalism, not been counteracted by it. Adam Smith might hypothesize that as the government is more and more involved in the market, it picks with disproportional force 'winners' and 'losers' that may be contrary to the long-term health and benefit of the system. Capitalism is conflict-based. Successful capitalism REQUIRES some people make bad choices and suffer for those choices for the collective good. It equally requires businesses to fail - with the concomitant pain for the workers of said businesses. A close reading of the Wealth of Nations makes it clear that for capitalism to function at its healthiest, it HAS to be universal. Any intrusion of anti-market activity - specifically, government - harms the efficacy of the system as a whole in broad and subtle ways. (FWIW union activity itself is inherently NOT anti-capitalistic, as some shallow commenters have suggested; labor organization, striking, etc are all very inherently capitalistic responses to perceived imbalances in the power between employer and employee; HOWEVER, government taking a side and preventing the natural resolution of the conflict is very *definitely* anticapitalistic)

I'm not making any prescription here. Just observing that the 'common wisdom' that 'as capitalism increases, so does wealth disparity' doesn't seem to be borne out by historical fact for at least the last 100+ years.

An open letter to those who complain about the political climate:

Isn't this exactly what we wanted?

I mean, we're the electorate, and we consistently vote for representatives who are short-sighted, self-interested, and frankly, stupid.

I don't care WHICH side of the political fence you're on. Both parties have full rosters of idiots, and we seem to be listening more and more to the histrionic extremists and punishing the moderate centrists.

BOTH parties seem entirely focused on maintaining their own partisan grip on power and enriching their supporters, rather than actually doing their jobs.*

*and yes, it's not just Democrats and Republicans.  There is a rind of political 'conscientious objectors' who insist on voting for third-party candidates.  Yes, on occasion when the two major blocks are precisely balanced, this can make a difference in US politics.  But understand, the bulk of the dialogue is between the two basic parties in the US, and the the 'third option' only has influence as a tiebreaker.  They throw no weight, politically, except insofar as their message becomes broadly interesting to one demographic or another such that they're co-opted into the main platform of their nearest political faction.  So yes, you can sit comfortably with your conscience that you're 'doing the right thing' but understand that in practical terms you're impotent to make policy.

Instead of having a reasonable cross-spectrum discussion about meaningful subjects like the role of government in the 21st century, we seem to be satisfied with an educational system that churns out 'citizens' with only a faint grasp on basic concepts of math or reading (to say nothing of civics, history, or art), and who are thereby easily swayed by entertaining but vapid emotionalist demagogues from both extremes.

Assume you have a budget planner who can't do basic math, and continues to budget your spending for far, far more than you make every year. Then, when things get tough, he does things like whine that "you need to just make more money" and cut off your long term investments instead of making the needed choices about maybe not buying a new gun this year, or cutting off some of the freeloading relatives who could probably get a job anyway (mainly because the guy you buy guns from takes him on junkets, and the freeloading relatives keep recommending that he's the guy for the job, respectively).
Wouldn't you FIRE him immediately for gross incompetence, if not have him outright prosecuted?

Some of us had the 'excessively sympathetic friend' in high school. The friend that, whenever something went wrong, they always 'helped us' by figuring out someone else to blame for everything. Didn't get the library book in on time? It was the LIBRARY's fault for being closed on Sunday (not you, for waiting until the very last moment to return it...). Girlfriend dumped you? She was a controlling harpy (it certainly had nothing to do with you cheating on her, that was just a mistake...). Failed calculus? Of course it was because the teacher hated you (and nothing to do with the fact that you got stoned instead of doing your homework). It was always someone else's fault.

Those are the talking heads on both sides.
They are entertainers. They are employed because they are entertaining blamers. Not because they're reasonable, not because they're wise. And we keep listening to them - the Limbaughs and Colters, the Maddows and Mahers. These are the people that make us feel better because everything is "someone else's fault".

WE are the ones who keep returning 95%+ of politicians to their seats.
WE are the ones who are ultimately responsible for putting them there.
WE have nobody to blame but ourselves.

A considered response to http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/01/science/earth/clouds-effect-on-climate-change-is-last-bastion-for-dissenters.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

 I know I'm going to be castigated as a "dissenter" (Yikes, just that name reeks of quasi-religious orthodoxy. How dare he disagree!) but sure, I'll bite:

'For decades, a small group of scientific dissenters has been trying to shoot holes in the prevailing science of climate change, offering one reason after another why the outlook simply must be wrong.' 
I'm not sure "decades" applies, as it's only been about a decade and a half since the alarmists started warning us that the sky was falling. When initially presented by a blowhard self-promoting politician, it's hard to take the 'science' seriously. If Rush Limbaugh produced a propaganda film insisting that 2+2=4, I'd likewise start to doubt whatever it was he was promoting. Let's also remember that there's a bit of a 'cry wolf' case here; the people claiming that armageddon was now approaching, had previously told us that:
- we were going to all starve to death
- we were going to run out of oil
- we were going to run out of fresh water
- we were covering our country in landfills
- DDT was going to kill us all
- nuclear power was going to kill us all
(etc. ad infinitum) ...and that sort of bombastic pessimism HAS been going on for decades (real decades, not inflated decades).

Initially they claimed that weather stations exaggerated the warming trend. This was disproven by satellite data which shows a similar warming trend. 
I'm not sure that's true. Well, probably SOMEONE somewhere said that. My concern was that weather station data was sparse, extremely questionably interpolated in a way that seemed to encourage bias (upward), anecdotal evidence that many of the long-standing weather stations in the US had been subject to encroaching urbanization without (as far as I could see in the data) any correction for that, etc. Further, while the "hockey stick" (that started this) shocked me as fully as it did Mr Gore, I was suspicious of the statistical methods that had been broadly explained in its initial presentation. Further, I'd (anecdotally) remembered stories about oranges growing in England that didn't seem to be reflected in the data. As more discussion followed, people who were far more savvy than me presented a more-convincing case that the statistics used were deeply flawed. This of course made me wonder why someone would do this - by accident or on purpose. To be frank, I immediately categorized Messrs. Mann (et al) as eco-alarmists, the broad group of discredited wierdoes I'd been ignoring since the 1970s. Frankly, that's the hole that "global warming" alarmists have had to try to climb out of since then. I'll be very clear: In my mind, this definitely weighed against subsequent AGW claims.

Further, and regardless of his conclusions (many of which I believe to have been either overstated or otherwise flawed; I *do* feel strongly that his whole point about opportunity costs of chasing CO2 vs other beneficial ecological investments is the baby that's gone out with the bathwater) the vitriol and fury directed against Bjorn Lomborg for daring to doubt the data was even more confirmation for me that this was no longer a scientific issue - this took on the tenor of a secular Inquisition.

Next, solar activity was blamed for much of the warming. This looked like a promising theory until the '80s, when solar output started to diverge from global temperatures. 
Really? http://www.tmgnow.com/repository/solar/lassen1.html [tmgnow.com] seems to present fairly soberly.

Comparison of the extended solar activity record with the temperature series confirms the high correlation between solar activity and northern hemisphere land surface air temperature and shows that the relationship has existed through the whole 500-year interval for which reliable data exist.
A corresponding influence of solar activity has been demonstrated in other climatic parameters. Thus, both the date of arrival of spring in the Yangtze River Valley as deduced from phenological data and the extent of the sea-ice in the Atlantic sector of the Arctic sea have been shown to be correlated with the length of the sunspot cycle during the last 450 years.
Conclusion
70-90 years oscillations in global mean temperature are correlated with corresponding oscillations in solar activity. Whereas the solar influence is obvious in the data from the last four centuries, signatures of human activity are not yet distinguishable in the observations.

Certainly, from other sources it seems to me that the correlation seems to have diverged in the past 30 years. It's hard to imagine that a system correlates accurately for about 500 years, then suddenly doesn't. I don't know what to make of that.

Now, climate contrarians are convinced that changes in cloud cover will largely mitigate the warming caused by increased CO2. The New York Times examines how even this last bastion for dissenters is crumbling. Over the past few years, Several papers have shown that rather than being a mitigating factor, changes in cloud cover due to warming may actually enhance further warming."
To suggest this is some sort of 'climate contrarian' homogeneous dogma is again, misrepresenting it. As far as I've seen, the impact of clouds in modeled systems has been extremely rationalized and frankly doubtful. For AGW advocates to suggest that this has been anything but a weak part of their models seems a bit disingenuous. To me, this has been one of their most dissuasive tactics: false certainly and the misrepresentation of speculation as widely established and infallible fact harms their case when NATURALLY in the course of scientific inquiry hypotheses are sharpened and theories are tightened as more data is applied.

I'm genuinely pleased if their models now do a better job of including more accurate cloud modeling. If by "more accurate" this only means "fits our prognostications of doom" that's going to be less convincing.

I understand that by having any questions about anthropogenic global warming I'm already a thick-browed neanderthal. But I've *tried* to be conscientious about this. When An Inconvenient Truth came out, honestly, it smelled like something from Leni Reifenstahl. But it was hard to imagine that it was all made up, so there must be SOME facts behind it, and they alone might be troubling. I'd immediately downloaded a half-dozen sets of tree-ring temperature proxy data from some US government website, dumped it into excel (which was ugly, this was long before it had been parsed for public consumption) and I saw NOTHING to suggest recent warming. But I'm very well aware I'm not a climate scientist, so I kept digging for long-term climate data, always trying to find and evaluate the least-'interpreted' data possible.

What I see is a repetition of sudden and startling temperature/CO2 spikes on about the 120-140kiloyear cycle over at least the last million-800k years, the last being about that same span ago. So to my amateur eyes it seems like a long-term cycle that we're about due for another spike. Is this the cause of the current changes, or something human-driven? I genuinely don't know.

Certainly, it's inarguable that humans are affecting their local microclimates from heat output, pavement, groundwater diversion, draining of wetlands, output of particulates and aerosols, etc. It's almost inconceivable that a species with such an impact could hit the 7 trillion mark and NOT have an impact on the planet. The contribution of effects from all these microclimates ALMOST CERTAINLY has some impact on our macroclimate. Is this all the result of CO2? Obviously not. (In fact, I tend to be more suspicious of anyone that points to sole-causes on a system as complex as climate.)

On the other hand, history is replete with Humanity assuming their exceptionalism - assuming that they were somehow 'special' or more important (than other species, or even other ethnicities sadly). I'm not sure we've grown out of that conceit. Further, with or without human activity, climate WAS NEVER GOING TO BE STATIC. The claim is, certainly, that human impacts are happening faster than the planet's ever seen before - that's simply ludicrous. Volcanism, asteroid impacts, whatever - great, colossal changes have happened to this planet's environment in MUCH shorter timespans...generally coinciding with a 'wipe' of 60%+ of extant species. (We probably owe our current dominance to the last of these.)

Ultimately, the system settles down to a new normal. In any case I would wager that life on earth will continue with us or not.

In the final analysis:
- climate change seems a staggeringly massive system that we are only starting to understand
- there is every reason to try to be more efficient at energy production, distribution, and eliminating waste regardless of global warming
- the histrionics of the AGW folks scare me badly. Personally, the toyed-with ideas of geoengineering all seem catastrophically (and I mean that word precisely) reactionary, poorly thought-out, and smack of Simpsonian Bolivian Tree Lizard-solutions. The economics of cap & trade, while perhaps well-meant to some genuinely concerned folks, are little more than a systems of ecological indulgences (and probably about as effective).

What I see is (another) wave of mostly-white first-world liberals who feel deeply guilty at their lifestyles and want to "do something" constructive, and will spend any amount of (other peoples') money to "fix things", even if they have to fly (First Class) to sixteen global climate conferences to convince us how serious they are.

And that's where I end, and I've tried to be as honest and candid as possible. I'd love to actually debate this with someone who would help me understand what I don't.

FWIW and in all openness, I don't believe much of any new data I see any longer on either side. It's become so deeply politicized, the presentations are so tendentious, that I can't really grant any source the sort of inherent credibility they might have had 15-30 years ago. Everything now is either misleadingly portrayed or is a constant effort at goalpost-shifting. An example? Sea ice. For a decade we've heard about sea-ice decreasing in the arctic, proved with ample and very easy-to-understand pictures. Then, suddenly, sea ice actually was increasing. Well, wait, said the alarmists - that's just THIN surface ice, what we really mean to talk about is volume. Nobody talked about volume before; "thin" surface ice - which would nicely melt quickly and show great swaths of open sea at the slightest warming - was perfectly adequate when it HELPED make their point. Whether the original point is valid or not (I actually believe it is), this seems very much like the sort of discussion one would have with someone who is arguing from belief, not reason.