Four points.
1.The troops aren’t “Our Kids.” They left kid status behind the moment they signed on the dotted line - an act that arguably made them more fully adult then their nervous-nelly helicopter parents. After that, parents exercise no further control: their offspring are not their personal property.
2. “Boots on the ground” is not the ultimate, decisive way to engage. Quite the opposite: foot troops have the poorest ratio of vulnerability to effectiveness of any force element. Without coordinated support from every other system in the battlespace, they cannot so much as survive. This should have been obvious 100 years ago: no other “lesson of history” from World War One looms larger.
3. American notions of what constitutes “enough time” to wind up a conflict are unrealistically short. We’re up against enemies who think in terms of centuries, perhaps millennia. We’re still two or three generations short of anything they’d think of as “short term.”
4. Americans have it backwards: war is the norm, peace the exception. There is nothing easy about peace - it’s not the resting state of any social system and won’t occur spontaneously. It takes real effort to achieve, and constant attention thereafter.
Lengthy confrontations require a culture that supports them. Chest-beating and wasting lives and treasure is pointless without backing from the culture. Temporary political arrangements without changing the culture is simple waste that weakens.