[kqr]

It's not exactly rocket surgery, is it? Because they are fighting on the other side of the world. I feel like the article glosses over this way too quickly.

It's not surprising the US aren't winning. It's surprising they are at all able to do something that resembles waging war at that distance. Wars are incredibly hard to fight away from home. On the other side of the world? There is basically only one country in the history of ever that has been able to do that.

The article does go on to discuss the Kuwait case and that's a meaningful discussion to have, because actually winning a war so far away is surprising. It's interesting to dig into why that might have been, and the article briefly does. But why they aren't winning is less interesting.

For more meat on how important a factor distance is, Bueno de Mesquita's The War Trap presents one of the most accurate models for predicting wars[1] I know of. That model measures the fighting ability of a country by two factors:

1. It's at-home military power as a sum of population size, metal production, fuel consumption, military expenditure, etc.

2. It's power projection as the distance between its capital and the closest point of enemy land.

Note that the second number is weighted equally to the sum of all other factors, because wars are a logistical nightmare.

[1]: https://entropicthoughts.com/war-what-is-it-good-for

[usrnm]

> There is basically only ever one country in the history of ever that has been able to do that

I guess you mean the British empire? Or Dutch? Maybe Spanish?

[kqr]

I was thinking of the British Empire. Their naval technology was superior enough to overpower the distance term.

I was under the impression the Dutch didn't really wage interstate war in the same sense, but rather that a bunch of paramilitary private organisations happened to fly Dutch flags. I have to admit I know very little about the Spanish case, but again I thought they mainly fought proxy wars with other European colonial powers, i.e. both were equally disadvantaged by distance.

[jimnotgym]

Well Spain had most of south America, some of the carribean and the Philippines. The Dutch had the Spice Islands, half a world away. Portugal had Brazil, Azores, a bit of India and a base in China.

France had most of continental Europe, with distances that were much greater comparitively, considering they only had horses and sail boats. They also had big interests in the Indian ocean, Madagascar for instance, and the Caribbean.

[fnordsensei]

And didn’t Genghis Khan more or less go to war with most of the known (and some of the unknown) world and for all intents and purposes win?

[jimnotgym]

Without airplanes and powered ships too. A much bigger feat than the modern US vs Afghanistan.

[rbanffy]

Don't forget the Portuguese. They were a superpower thanks to their investment in maritime technologies.

[malfist]

Or the romans or the Mongols?

[throwup238]

Wiping out the natives isn’t the same thing as waging a war. Even from the beginning the European empires had very tenuous control over their New World colonies* and once they had to actually fight wars against well equipped European colonists to defend their control, it was a disaster for them (Bolivar, American Revolution, French and Indian war, etc).

The closest counterexample is probably the partitioning of China but that’s got its own mitigating factors

* they couldn’t even enforce the most basic sovereignty like when Spain introduced the New Laws and the encomenderos were like “lol no”