If you think that&#x27;s what happened in Iraq, then you have a simplistic and woefully inadequate view of how the war actually went.<p>If there&#x27;s any one big thing we learned in Iraq, it&#x27;s how Counter-Insurgency works and how important it is. You can&#x27;t simply roll in and impose your will on a well-armed populace, no matter how many ships and planes and tanks you have. You will be hit over and over again by snipers and small ambushes that fade away before you can bring your resources to bear. There are no big targets to use your big weapons against, and using them arbitrarily against the civilian population will enrage more people into fighting against you than the number of actual combatants it kills. You can&#x27;t get any good information from anybody on who the insurgents really are and where they are.<p>The force that is closest to the population will basically always win in the end, even if they have less resources. The only way for an outside force to successfully counter an insurgency is to make themselves more close to the population than the insurgents. That&#x27;s how the US won in Anbar late in the war - the insurgents, despite being the same religion and more culturally similar, were so brutal, arbitrary, and disrespectful of local traditions that they were willing to side with Americans from an ocean away to get them out.<p>The other important part is how the soldiers themselves feel. It makes less of a different when you&#x27;re an ocean away from home in a very foreign culture, since there&#x27;s not really any practical way to desert. If they were ever to operate in America against Americans, that could be a very big deal. Soldiers aren&#x27;t order-following robots; you&#x27;re going to have to convince them to fire weapons at, and take fire from, their friends and neighbors on the orders of somebody far away to impose something they may not care about or believe in. It&#x27;s not necessarily impossible, but it makes things a lot harder.