The definition of winning, with regards to war is wrong. It’s “comprehensive”. Our government cannot do anything that is “comprehensive”.
The definition established as a win, with regards to war, needs to remain strictly militarily. When the enemy’s forces have surrendered or are no longer capable of effective and organized resistance, the ware should be won.
By this measure still, I’m not sure we can call either of the wars a “win”. But I will say, we defeated Iraq cleanly. Then a new war started with a different foe when the terrorist came in with IEDs.
If we want to do government building like in WWII, that should be a separate operation from the Military Goal. And that too should be clearly defined and include security forces. This means setting up bases like in Europe and Japan to sustain those security forces. Call it occupy if you want. I don’t care.
I agree. The article’s premise that winning requires creating a stable, democratic state behind you is false. That is a scheme to keep a peace, not winning the war. Our dilemma is that we are not exhausting our foes capacity for action against us. By trying to prop up a “stable, democratic state” before exhaustion, we give terrorists a sufficient base to continue operations.
Our foes are amorphous and the “countries” we are fighting against are disunited themselves. They choose terrorism as a mode because it requires no united national backing or infrastructure, and because they know they would lose drastically in a conventional forces war. Fighting terrorism is grossly inefficient, so the terrorists’ strategy is to wear us down, destroy civil liberties, and ruin our quality of life in the meanwhile. Only by eliminating civilized values could we become ruthless enough to deal with them (i.e., systematic genocide against Muslims would work, but we would become uncivilized beasts in the process). We lack the political will for that.
Not sure what the solution is, but what we are doing isn’t it.
To win a war against a civilization means killing so many of them they can no longer continue. Then you kill some more until they beg you to stop. Asl Germany and Japan. They were not just defeated on the battle ground. They were ground into the earth from whence they sprang.