Why America Stopped Winning Wars

To find a way out of its current security crisis, the United States must recognize some hard truths. Most important among these is understanding why America stopped winning wars. The last American war to date ended, in substance, a decade ago, when the U.S. formally concluded its combat operations in Afghanistan. Since then, a country forged in war, and sustained to a large degree by victories in numerous highly consequential wars which followed, has lost sight of the fundamental fact that there is often no alternative to war, and no alternative to victory.

For the United States to emerge as a country in the first place, of course, it needed to gain its independence from the British Empire, which was not inclined to let the Colonies go. On April 19, 1775, the colonists took to their muskets at Lexington and Concord, and began the multiyear Revolutionary War. It was in this war that America’s Declaration of Independence was born, and its excoriation of the king includes the charge that he “has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.”

Within less than two months of the declaration’s signing, British regulars nearly destroyed George Washington’s Continental Army on Brooklyn Heights, and forced him to retreat hastily in the dead of night. The war only ended with the Treaty of Paris in 1783. If the colonists had not persevered, for years, against what was then the world’s richest empire, there would have been no United States of America.

America’s example quickly proved infectious abroad. On July 14, 1789, barely more than a year after the ratification of the Constitution, the people of Paris stormed the Bastille. The fall of the absolutist monarchy, the Old Regime, initiated a very slow and bloody, but nonetheless irreversible, spread of republican institutions through most of Europe.

Perfecting America itself would also require war, on a greater scale than the War of Independence. President Lincoln’s preliminary Emancipation Proclamation of Sept. 22, 1862, came five days after the Battle of Antietam, the bloodiest day in American history. The 13th Amendment, which finally abolished slavery, was passed on Jan. 31, 1865, as the Union Army was at long last gripping the Confederacy’s throat on the siege lines of Petersburg. More Americans died in the Civil War than in all the rest of America’s wars combined.

This is the most basic pattern not just of American history, but of the history of the world. The greatest of political disputes, over fundamental questions of policy and morality, are not settled by negotiation, eventually leading to peaceful diplomatic compromise. Rather, they are resolved in bloody battle, in which one side imposes its view of what is right upon the other. American colonists imposed their independence on Britain at the point of a gun. The Union states imposed the liberation of the slaves upon the Confederate states in the same way.

Both world wars, the worst catastrophes so far in human history, happened in large part because the United States watched from afar, year after year, before acting decisively to win wars that directly threatened its national security. The aggressive ambitions of kaiser’s Germany were already on display at the beginning of the First Moroccan Crisis in March 1905. Yet, it took two and a half years of a gigantic war starting in August 1914, a German policy of unrestricted submarine warfare, and the extraordinary Zimmermann Telegram in which Germany’s foreign minister offered Mexico parts of American territory, for America to finally abandon neutrality and join the war in April 1917. Without fresh American forces, there would have been no Allied victory. With them, victory was won, and an Armistice was forced upon Germany on Nov. 11, 1918.

Victory having been won, isolationism was again triumphant in the U.S. On Jan. 10, 1923, President Harding ordered the withdrawal of the last American troops from Germany, thereby making the terms of Versailles, or any other alternative peace arrangement, unenforceable. Ten years and 20 days after American troops were redeployed back home, Adolf Hitler became German chancellor. Without American involvement, Britain and France could not find the strength to act against him.

Hitler began the Second World War in September 1939 and by June 4, 1940, France was in a state of collapse. Only the extraordinary efforts of Winston Churchill, who in his famous speech on that day declared that “we shall go on to the end,” prevented Britain from either coming to an arrangement with Hitler, or pursuing a long, ineffectual phony war against him while he and his Axis allies conquered the rest of the Eastern Hemisphere.

Churchill ended his speech with an appeal to “the New World, with all its power and might” to rescue the Old. But it wasn’t until another aggressor state, Japan, attacked America at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, that the U.S. joined the war against the Axis powers in the Pacific. American involvement in the European war theater might have taken a considerable additional amount of time, had Hitler not taken the initiative by declaring war on America on Dec. 11. With a certain lack of self-reflection, he accused President Roosevelt of seeking “unrestricted world domination and dictatorship.”

America, rather than initiating and controlling events, had been dragged out of years of slumber into both world wars. However, even before the country was fully mobilized for war, its industrial strength made a decisive contribution to Allied victory. On the Eastern front of the European war, almost 18 million metric tons of Allied lend-lease aid to the Soviet Union, most of it American, were a pillar of the Soviet war effort. On other fronts, America’s enormous strength combined directly with that of her Allies to put in the field forces of hitherto unimaginable size. By the end of the war, the U.S. Navy alone had 6,768 ships, including 23 battleships and 99 aircraft carriers. Little wonder that within less than four years of America’s entry into the war, the Axis powers were obliterated.

Yet when America marks the 80th anniversary of VE-Day and VJ-Day next year, it will also mark eight decades since it has won a decisive victory in war. The reason is that since 1945, America has adopted patterns of thought and action that make victory impossible.

First and foremost, the U.S. has adopted a set of laws and practices which it did not, and could not, follow in the world wars. The protection of civilians is now, and has been for decades, an essential consideration in U.S. military operations. The latest formal document on this subject is the Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Action Plan of Aug. 22, 2022, which claims that “mitigating … civilian harm … makes us the world’s most effective military force.” Of course, the opposite is true. When the U.S. armed forces are required to “integrate civilian protection into our mission objectives from the start,” as the plan directs, attaining objectives that are essential to victory becomes impossible.

Senseless and wanton attacks on civilians are indisputably immoral. But if the primary objective of all military operations is the absolute protection of civilian populations, the purpose of these operations is lost. Military leaders are turned into second-rate lawyers, and instead of defeating the enemy decisively and winning the war, they focus instead on following rules that make war interminable. This ethos, which leads to years of inconclusive military engagements that in the end do little to reduce civilian death totals, was a central cause of America’s expensive and demoralizing military failures in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

As anyone who understands military operations knows, war by its very nature often involves terrible harm to civilians. When America was pursuing the essential objective of defeating Japan as rapidly as possible in 1945, it was deemed necessary to incinerate much of Tokyo with cluster bombs filled with napalm bomblets. That led to a horrific number of civilian deaths—more than in any other air raid in history, including America’s subsequent nuclear strikes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Yet this merciless way of waging war achieved the objective of bringing the Second World War to a victorious end, saving the lives of hundreds of thousands of American soldiers and millions of Japanese civilians, and allowing the United States to transform Japanese politics and society in a manner that has benefited the lives of hundreds of millions of Japanese since.

Because the mass armies of dictatorships are drawn from civilian populations, and are necessarily supported by them at every level of society, it is not possible to defeat them without a large number of civilian casualties. In a dictatorship, many civilians serve the regime in a wide variety of ways, from working in vast government organizations to informing the dictatorship’s police and intelligence services about its current or potential opponents, to the manufacture of armaments.

Control of a territory by an extremist movement necessarily means that the majority of the civilian population either actively sustains it or else tacitly accepts its activities. Those whom the extremists perceive as threats are murdered, or else driven into voluntary or involuntary exile. Many of those who remain are beneficiaries of the terrorists’ efforts to maintain wide public support. This is especially the case in sectarian societies such as Lebanon, where the Shia, who are represented in the state by Hezbollah, benefit from the group’s social foundations. It is impossible to win a war against such an enemy by maintaining a false pretense that the population at large is fully distinct from the terrorists.

It should be clearly understood, and publicly stated, that if a population lives in a territory controlled by a hostile force, especially a densely populated territory like parts of Iraq and much of Gaza, it will suffer serious and continuous losses during a war. Any other approach gives murderous criminals an extraordinary and intolerable freedom to wage war and murder others.

The purpose of wars waged by democracies, including America, is to remove acute military danger, not anything else. Protecting the population of a hostile territory or state in a manner compatible with the removal of the acute military danger is appropriate. What is neither appropriate nor acceptable is taking such measures to protect the population that it becomes impossible to achieve the purpose of the war, the defeat of the enemy.

Another reason for America’s failure to win wars is the poorly defined and easily manipulated doctrine of proportionality, which holds in the version appearing in the U.S. Department of Defense Law of War Manual, that “force may be used … only to the extent that it is required to repel the armed attack and to restore the security of the party attacked.” Applied to individual military actions, it implies that a military should “refrain from attacks in which the expected harm incidental to such attacks would be excessive in relation to the concrete … military advantage.”

As with all law on controversial subjects, this legal doctrine is a very flexible servant of the meaning attached to it in practice. As the world can see in the case of America’s feeble fighting with the Houthis, proportionality becomes the bedrock of a practice of avoiding decisive action. Proportionality becomes the policy of not doing more than beating back the latest enemy attack—they shoot at us, we shoot back, the incident ends. The enemy is allowed to retain the initiative, to choose when, where, and how to launch the next attack, all while gaining experience and adapting to defeat American tactics more effectively. Instead of deterring the enemy, proportionality encourages the enemy in the belief that with proper preparation, America can and will be forced to retreat.

America used to be defined, with the confidence of stating a self-evident fact, as a superpower. In fact, Americans still like to use the term. A sober view shows that America has spent decades in a manner which have drained away its resources on strategically questionable wars that resulted in failure and led to strategic gains by America’s enemies.

Israel, a country of just 10 million with no friendly population on any of its borders, cannot afford to follow America’s example. America might be able to avoid national suicide by correcting its policy errors, because of the great physical distance that separates it from its enemies. Israel’s enemies are right on the border, and Israel has neither a moment nor a square foot to spare.

The events of Oct. 7 demonstrated that Hamas indeed posed and continues to pose a catastrophic threat to Israel’s citizens. If Hezbollah’s forces poised on Israel’s northern border had followed through on its own invasion plans for the Galilee on Oct. 7, for which we now know it was amply prepared, the result might well have been three or four times the scale of mass killings, perhaps precipitating the collapse of Israel. Proportionality, in its true sense, would therefore dictate the annihilation of Hamas in response, to remove an existential threat.

Yet, in contemporary American military and government understanding, proportionality means that every Israeli action should be examined from the point of view of whether “disproportional harm”—often meaning, any harm—has been inflicted on noncombatants. This is insane in the literal sense, as there is no way for Israel to apply this principle in practice and at the same time destroy Hamas.

The reason why the U.S. managed to spend the extraordinary sum of $2.3 trillion on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and other, associated operations, is largely “proportionality.” Careful assessment of what is and is not a proportional attack, or a proportional campaign, is incredibly expensive. It requires the constant collection of a vast amount of detailed intelligence on such subjects as the number of civilians likely to be present in a particular building. In its implementation, proportionality is taken to require the use of guided “smart” low-impact munitions in almost all circumstances, another enormous drain on the budget. Repeated attacks on the same target with expensive munitions often substitute for single attacks with cruder weapons, whose death tolls might be higher—but which will not exhaust America’s financial strength and are more likely to lead to victory. If the Union had spent the Civil War obsessing about the proportionality of its actions instead of annihilating the Confederacy, the war would likely have ended in a stalemate, and the continuation of slavery in the South.

A third and final reason why America stopped winning wars is its misunderstanding of democratization, which is not at all limited to the actions of President George W. Bush, or the ideas of so-called “neoconservatives.” Predictably, relying on democratization as a long-term solution to a foreign threat has proved a misguided and exceptionally expensive approach.

A dangerous regime like Saddam Hussein’s is a proper target for war. Those who are inclined to suggest that Saddam was not dangerous, or no longer dangerous, by 2003, are invited to consider what a vicious dictator like him would have done with Iraq’s vast oil revenue over time. Iran, a very dangerous regime, earns much less money exporting oil than Iraq, partly because it is much simpler to extract and export Iraqi oil. Thus, making sure that Saddam was not left permanently sitting on top of a vast revenue stream to support future aggression was a legitimate military objective.

Imposing democracy on Iraq was not a legitimate military objective, because it could not be reasonably achieved in a limited period of time through force. A society which has existed as a tyranny for decades cannot suddenly be turned into a democracy, especially if the society is not very sophisticated, either technologically or socially, simply by means of military invasion and occupation. It is worth remembering that West Germany had previously been a democracy, however flawed, during the Weimar Republic. It was also an advanced industrial power. Under direct occupation by the Western Allies after a catastrophic military defeat, and with massive Marshall Plan aid, West German society was capable of again sustaining democracy—which was already a familiar form of government. Nothing of the kind was possible in Iraq.

Seeking democracy, or even some substantively democratic form of government, is futile in places like Iraq and Gaza, because democratic governance requires a preexisting institutional and social basis. What should be done, and what America can do, is to rapidly destroy military threats to its national security and economy—as was in fact done in America’s initial invasion of Iraq in 2003. Instead of attempting to police Iraq into the future, America should have then maintained forces in safe areas in close proximity, like Iraqi Kurdistan and Kuwait, to make sure that the old regime could not return to power.

America cannot afford to fight long wars against its enemies, both because of the cost, and because any long campaign inevitably teaches the enemy to adapt and adjust, and thereby become at least partially immune to attack. What the United States should do instead is carry out sudden crushing attacks, which can be repeated without warning. America’s nature as a distant power with a large air force and navy makes this approach ideally suited to its strengths, while avoiding its weaknesses. If you don’t want to suffer the consequences of such an attack, then don’t do things like attack shipping in the Red Sea or take Americans hostage.

For the moment, America has no strategy, no operational approach, not even a clear sense of the tactics it should employ, even in simple situations where America’s interests are clear—like keeping shipping lanes open or keeping nuclear weapons out of the hands of an Iranian regime that regularly promises “Death to America.” What America has, in overabundance, are empty soundbites. As long ago as Jan. 17, 2005, President Bush said of Iran’s nuclear program, “I hope we can solve it diplomatically, but I will never take any option off the table.” Two decades later, Vice President Harris says on that same topic, “diplomacy is my preferred path … but all options are on the table.” After two decades of continuing inaction, such rhetoric, on both sides of the aisle, is a portent of further failures to come.