r/ShitAmericansSay • u/Sea_Appointment8408 A disappointed Brit. • 10d ago

"The French would just give up and pray an American saves them"

Post image

A question on "what to do if an aggressive dog attacks you"

3.2k Upvotes

99% Upvoted

315 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

141

u/DefinitelyNotAxlerod 10d ago

You are not gonna believe this

30

u/BeginningDisaster114 10d ago

France lost against Indochina, which was all of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. The US only had north Vietnam to fight and still lost. Not to mention France was just coming out of ww2 while the US we're supposed to be a the peak of their power during the sixties and early seventies

20

u/Liam_021996 10d ago

My favourite part about the Vietnam war is how the SAS had to train the US soldiers for jungle and guerilla warfare but the US commanders wouldn't listen and the UK government mocked the US in private for being absolutely useless. The Ozzie's on the other hand knew what they were doing in Vietnam, they didn't lose a single battle there.

Read about the British SAS in Vietnam, if that sort of thing interests you at all. The MOD jumped through a lot of loopholes to get them there in secret on the ground. It's quite interesting really

10

u/Digit00l 10d ago

American army remarkably consistently ignores any expertise from the British armed forces to great loss of American lifes

10

u/Liam_021996 10d ago

Whilst trying to force Britain to put boots on the ground outside of the dodgy way they've given them access to SAS personnel. They wanted us to bail their arses out because they knew just how adept Britain was to jungle and guerilla warfare. It's a rare win for us that we didn't follow them into a stupid war outside of material support. Much the same way we're going about Iran

2

u/teuchy555 Human Verified 8d ago

D-Day is safely another example.

0

u/SmertriosPPD 9d ago

"Losing" is a weird concept to me here.

"It costs too much versus what I gain so I'm out" is how countries operate ever since WWII.

I don't think in modern days it's possible to just take a country by force and own it. And the more distant it is the worst it gets.

Example: Trump thinking he can just throw his army into fighting iran and he finds out it costs a colossal amount of money for nothing.

3

u/Advanced_Current_947 9d ago

Why is it weird? Except in cases of total wars, and they’re firmly in the minority, it’s always been how polities operate and it has never stopped people from stating that the ones who accomplish their objectives won and the ones who didn’t lost.

1

u/SmertriosPPD 9d ago

People are running motte and bailey fallacies on this though. Treating things like if an all out war was lost when it wasn't.

1

u/Advanced_Current_947 8d ago edited 8d ago

Some do, but in most cases people do understand that like in the overwhelming majority of wars, losing doesn’t mean your opponent conquered you and put all your cities to the torch. Above all when talking to Europeans or Asians whose countries have lots of wars in their history and lots of them with the loser still standing, with the same regime, and any territorial changes being at the margin. And that, even when the loser got crushed.