Why does the US continue to lose wars?

The lack of a clear cut traditional victory ,as we perceive it, in recent war is due to several factors. The first being lack of a cogent strategy which delineates clear cut goals and objectives and a plan for the endgame. We go in swinging with no clear objectives and when things begin to go south we fumble around for a fix.

We tend to fight ideologies..terrorism is an idea and a tactic for achieving political goals, communism an economic system. You can't fight an idea. Frankly, we were more secure in a bi-polar world...USA vs USSR.

Another factor is the plethora of failed states and non state actors where we are involved. The nation state is morphing there are fewer and fewer stable states. With this
change comes a change in the nature of war. As we all discuss 4GW, Boko Harum and ISIS run wild. The argument could be made that ISIS is a conventional force.

This asymmetrical form of warfare is with us for the duration and while we pivot to the west we are faced with the Chinese behemoth. A clear and cogent strategy must address existential threats.

The first thing we need to determine in any operation i

Great reads MAJ Jager thank you.

To say we keep losing wars is a loaded statement, for instance the war in Iraq and Iran, who or what exactly were we fighting? That question needs to be answered before this one, most people say we were fighting terrorism. However terrorism isn't one specific demographic or location. Therefore fighting it isn't technically possible. We can help those countries who are ravaged by it but we cannot eradicate it all together. We live in different times, for instance war itself in WWI and WWII was simpler, whomever had the biggest forces, the most bombs, and the strongest allies would win a war(for the most part). And then came Vietnam, where guerrilla warfare and similar fighting styles could be used to help the smaller forces wage war on a larger one. Things are much different in modern warfare, we have unmanned drones and weapon systems that can hit a target with a great degree of accuracy from such a substantial distance that the fighting can be done without puting a mans life on the line(again, for the most part). All of that being said, the enemies that we wage our wars on have also changed, fundamentally. We are no longer targeting specific groups of people like countries or political organizations such as Hitler's Nazi party. No today we target a mindset, a way of thinking, peoples actions, and a systematic approach to life. Terrorism for instance cannot be wiped out with the elimination of ISIS, that would be a start, however it's how some people choose to live their life and interpret their religion. Takeing out something like that takes 100% of the people on planet Earth working together, that's not going to happen. That would be like trying to eliminate vegitarians or buddhists, it's just not going to happen. So in my opinion america has not lost a war technically speaking, but when the smoke settles and the radiation clears, there will still be someone out there who wants to hurt other people, there will still be individuals who don't agree with the way America operates and there are still going to be countries who try to take on the land of the free and the home of the brave. You can shoot a terrorist but you can't kill terrorism.

WWII was an existential conflict, with the Axis powers seeking to conquer by force more than half the globe. There was no real possibility of an "honorable peace" with them. Even then, so long as it was Europe's problem or China's problem, most Americans were happy to go on with their lives.

That, to me, is why we continue to lose wars. Aside from the fact that our current wars are not against nations, but against ideologies, and those are nearly impossible to defeat by force of arms, we have no national stake in winning or losing. It's all mostly an academic exercise to most Americans. Unless they are somehow directly related to the military, they have no stake in the outcome. Even if they are, their stake is limited to getting their loved ones home, not necessarily to winning or losing.

For everyone else, their lives have not changed one whit since Afghanistan started or since we left Iraq. No one is paying higher taxes (than usual), no one is buying war bonds, no one is facing rationing, and no one is facing a draft. Without the occasional news reports or the feel-good "homecoming" videos, no one could even tell we are at war. How can we be surprised that we as a nation aren't winning when less than 1% of the nation is invested?

That's an easy one - The U.S. Is a country which has embraced to "Rule of Law". This means we adhere to and conform to the laws our leadership have enacted.

The problem comes in when we engage In warfare and our societal "Rule of law" gets implemented in the war fighting environment.

The first rule of warfare is to eliminate your enemy.
The second rule is there are no other rules.

We have encountered this in every conflict we have engaged in, during the Viet Nam Conflict, the Viet cong employed unrestricted guerrilla warfare and we fought by a constrained rule set.

I have often thought about the issue of losing and winning wars, and have come to the conclusions that there are times that we are actually wining. Example both Korea and Vietnam were to stop the spread of Communism and both were a loss from military view, but in the end where is communism the USSR is gone and China behaves more capitalist then the US. I think the reason for these current Low Intensity Conflicts (1980's Terms) is to vent the pressure that natural exists in an global economic world. Yes the military industrial complex has become more complex and they are making a Killing. But that is an issue that is human nature driven.

We get into fights where we don't belong, and realize we can't win them, because the national will to invest in these fights isn't there.

The war in Afghanistan was a prime example. We had specific objectives at first - get the Taliban and AQ. Because of massive mistakes, we missed the opportunity to get OBL when he was in Tora Bora.

Then we made things worse by getting bogged down into Nation Building - the same trap we fell into in Viet Nam. We should have left Af after the first year, but we (our esteemed leadership) were too steeped in righteous indignation about 9/11 and we couldn't see the forest for the trees...

Desert Storm was a great victory. Why? Because Bush senior set an objective - liberate Kuwait. We achieved that objective and then we got out (sort of). Many people felt he failed because he didn't take out Saddam Hussein, but that wasn't the point of Storm - it was liberating Kuwait, which we did. (and for which we got two different other nation medals - unheard of in past history...)

Then came Bush junior's Iraq war. He was going to do what daddy didn't, and what Clinton couldn't - he was going to get Saddam Hussein, and show Clinton what real expenditures of weapons looks like.

Except that there were really no objectives defined, because Iraq was an ill-conceived operation. Without objectives, it's not possible to "win" a war.

The end result is that we destroyed Iraq, created ISIS, and caused the lives of Iraqi citizens to be far worse than they were in the first place.

We let ego and nationalism get in the way of reality, and we get into these things, because we see ourselves as the "police force of the world".

It's time to let the Europeans stand up their own defenses, and stop being their army, and it's time to let Japan change her Constitution and stand up a military again.

Keep open the sea lanes, protect Israel, and ensure that only real US interests are pursued. Let the rest be - we can't change it or fix it.

We should only step in when there is world interest in pursuit - such as WW II, or when we are attacked.

That being said, we created the mess in Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, etc, with ISIS, so we have a moral obligation to go in and fix it...

1LT Sandy Annala CMDCM Gene Treants COL Charles Williams GySgt Wayne A. Ekblad

Gutless leadership at the federal level.

Narcissistic civilians have their hands in too deeply and are trying to balance appearing to do something militarily while preventing offending their liberal supporters who demand non-involvement. And usually being done by civilians with minimal or no military experience

We do not loose battles but we do lose wars, we go in to conflicts where civilian and military leadership do not thing over complete mission and what is the end goal, also says of convention war is coming slowly to the end and the beginning of low intensity war fare is starting mixed with economical war where big players use their proxies to do the battle

We don't "lose wars" but our past 4 major (Vietnam, desert storm, Iraq, Afghanistan) has seen our military unable to conduct itself properly at war due to the home front. Politicians more interested on themselves than in the needs of the on the ground war.

I'm not saying we need to be rolling out with no ROE or EOF but to te standards that it's at. We're basically fighting a war with hands tied behind our backs trying to fight.

It's said to win war we must completely remove our enemies will to fight. We have been unable to do so due to the restrictions placed on us by people sitting on a hill with no understanding of the military or war.