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. But this is not the norm, neither for American military intervention, nor for conflict in general.
Most of American military history does not look like these – conflicts which are large in scale, discrete in time, and definitive in outcome. Some of our previous interventions have been short duration and clear victories, but smaller in scale (e.g., Grenada and Panama). Some have been clear victories, but incremental, fought sporadically with fits and starts, and over the course of years if not decades (e.g., the several smaller conflicts which are often lumped together under the umbrella of the Indian Wars).
But then there is another category – one in which the conflict results in a seemingly less satisfying, but mostly successful result, sometimes after a series of stupid and costly errors, and sometimes after years of grinding conflict that end gradually rather than with a dramatic ceremony. The Korean War, often described as a “draw” because the border between North and South Korea remains today where it was before the beginning of the war, had moments of highs and lows, periods where it seemed nothing could prevent a U.S, led total victory, only to see the multinational force squander their advantage (e.g. reaching the Yalu river), and moments where all seemed lost, only to escape from the jaws of defeat through audacity and courage (e.g. Chosin Reservoir, Pusan, Inchon). But when President Truman committed U.S. forces as part of the UN mission to respond to communist aggression, the stated intent was to assist the Republic of Korea in repelling the invasion and to maintain their independence. South Korea still exists to this day. The combined communist forces of the PRK and CCP were prevented from achieving their aims by American military power.
We have a much more recent (and undoubtedly more controversial) example of a misunderstood success. Many of those who ballyhoo about America not winning wars point not only to the failure in Afghanistan, but also to the recent war in Iraq. The Iraq War was many things — initially fought with great tactical and operational brilliance, then sinking into lethargic and incompetent counterinsurgency, then adaptive to local power structures, and, of course, initiated under pretenses we now know to be incorrect. But it was not, despite the ironclad popular perception, a military failure. The military set out, with the invasion of 2003, to defeat the combined forces of the Iraqi Army and Republican Guard and remove the Ba’athist government from power. We achieved that goal. Once in control of Baghdad, the U.S. faced a new threat – one of a growing and complex insurgency for which we had failed to plan or anticipate. American forces under Ricardo Sanchez, and continuing under George Casey, seemed perplexed and frustrated by a conflict they had not come prepared to fight, nor that they adapted to. For years, despite the instance of many military and political leaders, the war was not going our way as American casualties increased month after month.
But by 2008 the Sawah, the movement of Sunni tribal militias aligning with the U.S. led coalition and the government in Baghdad, and the American efforts to adapt to a more effective counterinsurgency strategy were turning the tide, to the point that by 2010, the violence in Iraq had largely subsided.
The government the United States helped bring about in Baghdad to replace Saddam Hussein endures to this day, but not without difficulties. In his 2005 “National Strategy for Victory in Iraq,” George Bush defined victory in the long term as an Iraq that is “ peaceful, united, stable, and secure, well integrated into the international community, and a full partner in the global war on terrorism.” By continuing to maintain a relationship with Iraq, we are helping shape this long term result, just as we did as we helped postwar Germany and Korea maintain security and political stability.
In part due to the oppressive steps of a flawed Prime Minister, in part due to American desire to recede from presence and oversight in Iraq, and in part due to a compounding effect of spillover from the Syrian Civil War, there was the need for further American assistance in defeating the threat from ISIS, but defeat them we did – another success for the American military. The Iraqi government also has close relationships with our Iranian regional rivals, as many of the local Arab countries do based on proximity. But just as the need for the 2nd and 3rd Punic Wars does not change the fact the 1st Punic War was a Roman victory, the War against ISIS does not change the fact that the United States accomplished the goal of deposing and replacing Saddam Hussein. Likewise, the fact that the USSR gained influence over eastern Europe does not change the fact that WW2 ended in a definitive defeat of the Nazis.
None of that changes a separate question, however – whether the war was worth it. But that was a political decision, and one that does not negate the truth that the U.S. military first defeated the Iraqi military in a decisive win and then quelled a grinding insurgency in a less decisive way.
Just because a victory isn’t total, complete, satisfying, or is achieved after several horrible and demoralizing mistakes, doesn’t mean that the military fighting it lost. The War of 1812 was a victory, despite the fact the U.S. failed to achieve its maximalist goals of incorporating Canada but did achieve the goal for which the war was fought – rejecting British attempts to deny American sovereignty. World War II was a victory, despite the fact it set conditions for the Cold War and Communist oppression but did defeat the Nazis. Korea was a victory, despite the fact we did not unify the Koreas under the democratic South but did prevent the communist conquest of it. And Iraq was a victory — a poorly decided, stupidly managed, and possibly counterproductive in the long-term victory.
When viewed in this prism, the United States military has myriad successes since World War II and, in fact, has suffered a smaller handful of definitive losses in that time – Vietnam, Iran (Operation Eagle Claw), Somalia (1993), and Afghanistan – with the temporal proximity of the latter, and the fact that two of these were also America’s longest conflicts helping to warp American’s understanding of our military effectiveness.
None of this is to say that America should not take a harsh look at our recent military efforts, critique and analyze them, and seek continuous improvement. Grenada, as I have mentioned, was a victory, but an incredibly embarrassing one that was likely only successful because we fought a backwater Caribbean country with a population of less than 100,000 at the time. The hard lessons learned by examining the disasters, mistakes, and close calls from Operation Urgent Fury helped reform the military into the globally dominant force that defeated the world’s fourth largest army in 100 hours less than a decade later.
Americans should not look at our military through rose-colored glasses, chest thumping as we chant “USA” and insisting that no other force can land a glove on us. But neither should we allow the false narrative of failure to take hold. 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 – be they maximalist or limited – in using force. Armed conflict will remain a necessary tool for the United States. We absolutely need to adapt our military to meet, and defeat, the challenges of the future, and we need to balance and incorporate military power into our global strategies appropriately – but that will not happen if we do it based on the incorrect understanding of the past.
Mike Nelson is a retired Army Special Forces officer and currently chief of staff at the University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Washington. He is a contributing editor at Providence Magazine and a member of the Atlantic Council’s Counter Terrorism Project.