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Frazzled wrote:

n0t_u wrote:

Gwar! wrote:Conflict of 1812!

We won that, it just took us until 1814.

General Bob "We're losing! What do we do?"
Darth Vader: "Wait and have faith in the Dark Side. I am sending my apprentice. In two year's time you will meet the British in the land of begnettes. Frazzled will be there. Then we will have...peace."

Actually the winner and loser of the war is a perspective issue.

1) Americans consider the fact they won the later defensive portion of their war to = a win. Curiously the battle of Fort Bowyer is always forgotten when discussing the end of the war, given that it was fought after the Battle of New Orleans.

2) Canadians generally consider the war a victory as the early war was composed of American attacks on British North American soil were repulsed handily. the Americans burned Toronto but we're still not sure if that was a favour or not.

sebster wrote:
Or we can applaud the use of a popularly understood term triumphing over an obscure and misleading piece of jargon.

Seriously, when 50,000 of your soldiers die you were in a war.

There's actually a really interesting debate amongst international political theorists about what constitutes a war. Granted, its mostly the result of various theorists attempting to fit history into their theoretical framework (eg. democracies don't fight wars with one another, they only engage in conflicts), but its still interesting.

efarrer wrote:

Frazzled wrote:

n0t_u wrote:

Gwar! wrote:Conflict of 1812!

We won that, it just took us until 1814.

General Bob "We're losing! What do we do?"
Darth Vader: "Wait and have faith in the Dark Side. I am sending my apprentice. In two year's time you will meet the British in the land of begnettes. Frazzled will be there. Then we will have...peace."

Actually the winner and loser of the war is a perspective issue.

1) Americans consider the fact they won the later defensive portion of their war to = a win. Curiously the battle of Fort Bowyer is always forgotten when discussing the end of the war, given that it was fought after the Battle of New Orleans.

2) Canadians generally consider the war a victory as the early war was composed of American attacks on British North American soil were repulsed handily. the Americans burned Toronto but we're still not sure if that was a favour or not.

incorrect.
Frazzled relatives avenging Waterloo er uh defending freedom-WIN! What Yankees did for preceding two years = irrelevant.
Its a win in that it stopped Britain from impressing US sailors and proved to the world we could hold our own...mostly. Mexico really should have looked at that before marching troops into US terriritory a few decades later.

efarrer wrote:the Americans burned Toronto but we're still not sure if that was a favour or not.

Actually, I think that was payback for the Whitehouse.

ghosty wrote:Out of interest, which is better, the marines, or the army...?

Neither is 'better', we have different missions.

The Marines are more rapid deployment than the Army and are fully equipped for amphibious warfare, whereas the Army is more capable of handling a variety of missions and is much larger. They're more of the quick jab, and we're the knockout punch.

Happy Birthday to the US Army! My heart felt thanks to all the soldiers past and present that protect our country and keep us free. God bless you all.

Hooah!! Happy Birthday Army. I will always remember the friends I made and the pride I felt wearing the Army uniform (Afghanistan) as my Father (Vietnam) and Grandfathers (WWII) have before me. I will Definitely remember freezing my Haggis off in Hoenfells and Grafenwier. Also the joy I felt when I was given my DD-214 and

squilverine wrote:Everything needs to be defined in some way or another, I have merely provided the definition of a war as explained to me whilst serving in the army. Frankly when shots are being fired and you and your friends are in danger of being killed you couldn't give a monkeys if its called a war a conflict or a tea party. I am curious to know what is misleading or obscure about the word conflict? Is there an alternative understanding of the word?

I would think any reasonable definition of war would include some measure of scale and duration. I just can’t see the definition provided lining up with what are popularly considered wars. By the definition given, it wouldn’t have been the Boer War, it would have been the Boer Conflict. There was no fighting on German soil in World War I, so does that mean it was actually World Conflict I?

Hordini wrote:To be fair, Vietnam was more of a loss for the USA as a whole, rather than a loss for the actual army itself. The USA didn't leave Vietnam because the army was getting its ass kicked and was unable to fight anymore, the USA left because the Vietnam war had basically become way too politically unpopular. The US as a country may have lost Vietnam, but the US Army fought hard and did everything that was asked of it.

Well, sort of. The US was in Vietnam for about ten years, that’s a pretty reasonable time for a population to see that victory is no closer now than it was when the war started and to call it quits.

The reality is that in those ten years the US was not able force the North Vietnamese government into collapse, nor was it able to sufficiently build up the capabilities of the South Vietnamese. This is in large part due to the impressive competence and resilience of the North Vietnamese, in no small measure to the incompetence of the South Vietnamese.

No other Western power would have been able to do any better, and I think the ultimate reality was that given the political restraints, the capabilities of the North and the incompetence of the South, it was an impossible mission.

dogma wrote:There's actually a really interesting debate amongst international political theorists about what constitutes a war. Granted, its mostly the result of various theorists attempting to fit history into their theoretical framework (eg. democracies don't fight wars with one another, they only engage in conflicts), but its still interesting.

Sure, I accept there would be plenty of vagueness in the line in which a conflict or peacekeeping operation becomes a war. I think the trap a lot of people fall into is to define a word by some outside process and then seek to apply it to common use. The truth is the word’s definition is defined by its use.

A war is that collection of engagements we typically call wars. A conflict is that collection of engagements we typically call conflicts. In academic circles you accept language can differ from common use, but this isn’t an academic debate.