‘We should be clear eyed, about what our military has accomplished, can accomplish, and, in the future when called upon, the costs, risks and potential gains’
False narratives have a way of becoming taken as fact in popular understanding. After years of repetition, these statements calcify into articles of faith, not only going unchallenged, but having any counterarguments met with incredulity, as though the person making the alternative case must be uninformed or unaware of the established consensus. Once accepting these narratives, one is free to form a world view and make decisions based upon them – denying the reality that, if the underlying assumption is wrong, then so are the decisions that flow from it.
One of these which has taken hold among many since the humiliating end to the war in Afghanistan, is that the American military doesn’t win wars, or that it hasn’t since the end of World War II. This critique of the armed forces, foreign policy, or use of force has become an ironclad truth among many using it as a starting point to advocate for their own preferred change. Advocates of Secretary Hegseth’s vision for the military have echoed it – “the military had grown weak and woke, so we need to change the culture, ignore or at least diminish adherence to legal restraints, and remake the composition of the military.” Restrainers, isolationists, and America Firsters have joined the chorus – “America has given up blood and treasure on stupid wars in which we were failures.”
There is only one minor problem with this understanding, and more importantly using it as a baseline from which to derive policy prescriptions – it isn’t true, at all. It reflects a misunderstanding of how America has used force and what we have and haven’t achieved. And, unlike many misunderstandings about American defense, this isn’t solely amongst those with little familiarity of what the military does; the view has taken hold among many who should know better. There are several reasons for belief in the fallacy.
First is ignorance of what a war is, or at least not having a common definition of it. For the pedants, one could point out that the United States has not been at war, by strict definition, since 1945 (the last declaration of war was 1942 when we added Bulgaria, Hungary, and Rumania to the countries upon whom we had declared war in December 1941). However, this isn’t relevant to the topic at hand because if the United States has not fought a war since 1945, then by this definition we also haven’t lost one. In fact, the U.S. has only declared war during the War of 1812, The Mexican-American War, the Spanish-American War, and the World Wars, yet we have engaged in armed conflict significantly more times than these. So, for the purposes of this debate, we can reflect upon the United States using force to achieve foreign policy objectives. With this more expansive definition, then Grenada is just as much of a war as World War II (although the latter certainly is a source of more pride than the former).
Second is ignorance of the number of conflicts in which the United States has been involved. Americans tend to have short memories and often pay less attention to events beyond the water’s edge. Many are largely ignorant of even ongoing, smaller operations being conducted in their name (remember the shocked response to the Niger incident when many people, including congressional leaders, announced their ignorance of U.S. presence there?). This phenomenon is exacerbated by the passage of time. How many Americans are aware of our involvement in the Dominican Civil War in 1965? Or the various conflicts that made up the Banana Wars?
Third is ignorance or misunderstanding of the outcome of those wars. Our perspective has been skewed, likely due to the recent history of the embarrassing and self-inflicted defeat in Afghanistan, the messy and confusing nature of the war in Iraq, and the historic examples of very clearly defined wars with obviously complete victories. There was no ambiguity in the World Wars; the United States went to war with an adversary nation state (or coalition of them), fought their uniformed militaries, and ended these with a formal surrender ceremony abroad and victory parades at home.
