Have boots on the ground combat troops fighting against other troops become an obsolete method of warfare...

You can't occupy a country without infantry.

This. The Surge was the smartest thing the US did.

You seem knowledgeable. Why does it seem like the US pretty much half-assed both those wars.

Because the marines have a shit budget and they didn't have enough desert camo for everyone.

You cannot hold ground with airpower.

M81 Woodland was the standard camouflage pattern on the PASGT and later Interceptor vests in the 1980s and 1990s. Although substantial numbers of PASGT vests were made in the DBDU (chocolate chip camo) pattern in preparation for the Gulf War, they had been largely phased by the end of the 1990s. In 2001 and 2003, the US was mobilized for war quickly and had to start producing a new line of DCU vests from scratch. As a result, desert camo vests did not start being issued in substantial numbers until 2004.

Not entirely true actually. The Marine attached to the Rapid Deployment Force and MEUs had enough DCU vests on hand to equip the forces going to Afghanistan in 2001 and 2002. The reason they weren't used as much in Iraq was because camouflage vests in the USMC were already being phased out for solid brown ones as part of the transition to the MCCUU.

>Why does it seem like the US pretty much half-assed both those wars.

It did, especially in the first few years (2001-2003 for Afghanistan, 2003-2004 for Iraq), which was the most crucial time period. In Afghanistan, the US Military let the Taliban and Al Qaeda leadership escape into the relative safety of Pakistan (in one Kunduz, the Pakistani air force flew out hundreds of Al Qaeda and Taliban officers) where they were able to begin coordinating a guerrilla war against American forces and the new Afghan government. By the time the US Military started going after Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders in Pakistan in 2009 (President Obama reversed Bush's previous policy of a "hands off" approach in Pakistan), the insurgency was already in full swing.

Iraq was even worse. The US military managed to kill or capture most of the Iraqi Ba'athist government's leadership but the Coalition Provisional Authority set up to replace it was largely staffed by Bush and Cheney's cronies who had no fucking idea what they were doing (the one remotely qualified administrator, Jay Garner, was fired within a month for questioning Bush's decision making). As a result, not only does Al Qaeda manage to infiltrate the country within a year, but the economic and living situation in Iraq deteriorates to the point where Sunnis and Shiites start killing each other and the US finds itself caught in the middle.

War on Terror Redpills:

>Film
Taxi to the Dark Side
Severe Clear
Soundtrack to War
Restrepo
Korengal

>Literature
Imperial Life in the Emerald City by Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Al Qaeda's Great Escape by Philip Smucker
Fiasco by Thomas E. Ricks
Corporate Warriors by P.W. Singer
Generation Kill by Evan Wright

btw, it was the US Army who mainly kept using Woodland camouflage vests in OIF and OEF until the adoption of the ACU.

The future of warfare is genetically engineered super lolis

You cannot conquer anything with a jet and a looming threat of nuclear strike. Look at Obama's bombing in the middle east, it was utterly useless. Only when the Peshmerga and other militaries started to get serious did ISIS really get pushed back to near-irrelevance.

>blaming Obama for Bush's fuck ups

Bush wasn't the one who destabilized Syria

>Obama's red line in Syria was Bush's fault

lol

Bush fucked up but Obama didn't improve anything with 8 years of aerial bombardment.

>Blaming Bush for Libya and Syria

The boots can walk up to your hangars and silos if you don't have other boots to tie them up.

It should be noted that the ability to win a war is determined by both the ability to inflict and bear casualties.

No boots on the ground is a political decision reflecting the ability/will to bear almost no casualties.

Same goes for inflicting casualties - if you get a culture where bombing a completely legitimate target - a retreating but unsurrendered and still armed Iraqi army gets called a war crime (by which I mean the Highway of Death), then you are also limiting the ability to inflict casualties.

And that is how you lose wars.

What if you don't want to secure it, you just want to make it uninhabitable for a hundred years?

The problem is a nuclear war is barely even a war anymore and more akin to a genocide.

You realize that the US could launch its entire nuclear arsenal hours before any foreign troops could make it across the ocean to them, right?

This.

>it isn't history if it isn't at least 200 years in the past even though it contradicts the very definition of history

>Obama did 9/11

lack of good CAS aircraft, and it's much harder to bomb concealed targets in a jungle than sandniggers running around the desert.

This

Once stealh tech reaches critical point the only reasonable course of action will be to fire blindly all over the place

that or have some kind of suborbital or ultra-high-flying (like edge-of-space-tier) unmanned blimps with radar or other detection equipment.

>or if that doesn't work go back to the old method and just have a big cable hanging from them/tethering them to the ground

>~80km barrage balloon

The role of troops and armored vehicles is much less than during WWII. Aircraft are extremely important towards achieving any military goal today. However, you can't clear out a town with aircraft. You can't control a population with aircraft. Boots on the ground are essential for taking territory and you need armor to support those soldiers.

Boots on the ground are still the basis of all warfare, and will be until robots or drones fully replace them. Total war is different from the faux wars in Iraq etc that aren't really representations of two entire nations mobilizing for war. The western militarizes have the luxury of quality not being spread over quantity. They could feasibly run nothing but mechanized infantry and have enough vehicles to transport the army. Not even close to so for both World Wars, or after mass mobilization for a WW3.

In total war then, you cannot non-nuclear bomb your opponent out of the war. Strategic bombing can be used to destroy production, strategic defensive positions, and supply lines. But you cannot commit genocide with fighter jets, you simply do not have enough to do so. There's 40 million people in Tokyo today-- how many bombs will it take to kill them all? Once they begin fleeing to bunkers and engaging in countermeasures?

To seize and hold territory from the enemy, and the finish the bloody job, you need to move in infantry. You don't have enough resources to mechanize the entire army, and luckily you don't need to. Just like WW2, you have armored cores for punching through the enemy, supported by dispersed infantry to avoid being blown up by artillery. However, since WW2, the primary mover of war was artillery, which will continue to be more and more deadly for infantry. It doesn't remove their important, just applies higher attrition to them if fighters don't eliminate it.

Or you can just nuke everything and ignore all this, but nobody has yet and probably never will.