Obama 'US has finest Military force'

[BBMmk2]

President Obama has said whilst addressing tghe remaing l;ast forces in Iraq, that the US has the finest milatary fighting force i n the history of the world This is a very risky comment to make and I am hoping there will be reactions to this!!

The title should have read: 'US Finest Fighting Military Force'

[Ferretfancy]

America has not really won in any conflict since WWII, but brought immense tragedy when it could have done so much good.

[MrGongGong]

ALL politician say this nonsense its an essential part of the script

I'm waiting for the predictable stuff about the British Army being ALWAYS wonderful etc etc

[scottycelt]

If 'finest' means 'most powerful' and 'best-equipped' Obama's statement is indisputably true. If he means American forces are better-disciplined, braver and better fighters than those of any other country, he is talking the language of the schoolboy. In reality, he is also talking the language of the politician telling his audience what it wants to hear.

I've often read and heard that the British Military is 'the most profesional in the world' ... only in Britain, of course!

If historical experience is anything to go by, the best fighters in the world probably exist in poorer countries like Afghanistan and Nepal rather than any in the richer and "softer" West.

[ahinton]

"Thish wash their finesht hour", and all that (only for "hour" read "almost 9 years"). They can return home for Christmas with pride and with their heads held high (which is more than the dead ones and the dead Irqais can do). If anyone believes any of this, they're welcome, but pehaps their belief might be undermined by sufficient opportunities to witness cases of PTSD among those brave men and the consequences thereof for their friends and families...

[PatrickOD]

The King was Louis XV, the colonel a Wild Goose, and the epigram one of the pleasanter myths of the Wild Geese adventures that stretched from Tobruk to Belgrade.

The Irish Colonel
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Said the king to the colonel,
'The complaints are eternal,
That you Irish give more trouble
Than any other corps'.

Said the colonel to the king,
'This complaint is no new thing,
For your foemen have made it
A hundred times before'.

Rich and Rare: A Book of Ireland. Sean McMahon. Poolbeg Press.

[Pabmusic]

...the US has the finest military fighting force in the history of the world...

Hyperbole! Of course, you can be selective (the British are very good at this) and base your argument on a huge, technologically advanced, military that's grown out of a war economy in peacetime, like the Americans have. On the other hand you can base your argument on results, in which case there's only one answer. France.

According to Niall Ferguson, of the 125 European conflicts since 1495, France has been involved in 50 - more than any other nation - and they have won 109 of the 168 battles they have fought. (10 were indecisive, so they've lost 49.) No one else comes close.

[tony yyy]

I'd nominate the Sacred Band of Thebes as a candidate for the "finest fighting force in the history of the World" competition. I'm sure they would have easily been a match for the US army, assuming both were armed with traditional hoplite weaponry and were roughly equal in number.

[vinteuil]

According to Niall Ferguson...

'nuff said.

[Serial_Apologist]

The Viet Cong

[scottycelt]

The Tartan Army ...

[Serial_Apologist]

The Tartan Army ...

Nah - too CLAN-destined

[Mr Pee]

According to Niall Ferguson, of the 125 European conflicts since 1495, France has been involved in 50 - more than any other nation - and they have won 109 of the 168 battles they have fought. (10 were indecisive, so they've lost 49.) No one else comes close.

The Cheese-Eating surrender monkeys, the finest military fighting force in the world??


I suppose it just goes to show that statistics can prove anything you want them to.....and perhaps the French definition if victory is different to ours...

[Pabmusic]

The Cheese-Eating surrender monkeys, the finest military fighting force in the world??


I suppose it just goes to show that statistics can prove anything you want them to.....and perhaps the French definition if victory is different to ours...

"Statistics can prove anything you want them to" - a good epigram, but not exactly true. What statistics cannot do is prove that facts are wrong, and if the number of victories I've quoted is anything like right, then the case is unanswerable.

The problem is that we have a 'received impression' that the French surrendered in WW2 because they were 'cowardly'. Rubbish. They had been bled much whiter than we had by WW1 (almost twice the number of deaths and three times the number of wounded) from a smaller population (39 million against the UK's 45 million), and they fought well in 1940 (more than 200,000 deaths in two or three months). It's not surprising that they gave up, though, given that level of casualties.

Looking back, though, their record is considerable. As far as we were concerned, they drove the English out of France completely (despite Crecy and Agincourt) in the Hundred Years' War, defeated Henry 8th's attempts to invade, and won independence for the American colonies (it wasn't the Americans who defeated the Royal Navy and Cornwallis's army at Yorktown, by the way). They drove the British out of Europe again in the 1790s (the Flanders Campaign). They also conquered more of Europe than Hitler ever did. Why do you think that most countries drive on the right? Because the French controlled Europe at the time it mattered, the early 1800s, when revolutionary principles (like doing things differently from how they were done before) still held sway.

'Cheese-eating surrender-monkeys' came out of the second Gulf War, and we all know what a triumph for morality that was. The French were obviously awful for not wanting to be involved. Believe me, though, I'm no advocate for military prowess - it's brought endless misery over the centuries - but no-one gets close to France.

[scottycelt]

The silly (and particularly unfunny) phrase, 'cheese-eating surrender monkeys', was coined by 'Willie' the Scottish janitor in the Simpsons, at the time of the Iraq War.

Of course, no Scot is ever likely to say such a nasty thing about our old allies, the French. which is the very curious and ignorant aspect of the phrase. I don't know if it was an American or English scriptwriter responsible for this "comic" calumny.

Come to think of it, maybe it was mainly due to The Auld Alliance that the French have apparently won so many battles ... ?