Why is it so hard for the U.S. to win wars?
npr.org
npr.org
So we say "war" but modern conflicts are absolutely nothing compared to what has happened historically. Even though these new "wars" don't seem to have the same definitive results, the alternative could be much, much worse. We're much better off with the bomb critical sites, apply sanctions and political pressure methods vs. the send entire generations off to die methods of old.
These wars are really military engagements with directional objectives rather than truly existential wars with binary outcomes.
Modern wars really resemble Rome’s Germanic wars more than the Punic ones.
Flawed data.
Jan 29th: 1000 - 38 Feb 26th: 1000 - 35 Apr 9th: 1000 - 41 May 15th: 526 - 41 Jun 18th: 522 - 33 Jul 16th: 501 - 31
Total: 4549 - 219
While YouTube is full of videos of miles and miles of Ukrainian graveyards.
No need to use the Wikipedia excuse.
I guess it depends on what you mean by "easily", but Putin could very much just say "fuck this" and turn off the war machine in one day and it's not at all clear to me that there would be much consequential blowback other than the personal humiliation of one man.
Would other countries now decide to attack Russia? Of course not. Would the oligarchs flip out and have him assassinated? No. Would the West disassemble the sanctioning apparatus? Eventually.
But the real downside is just simple humiliation and to prevent that, they will continue sacrificing young men.
Politics is a fucked up game.
With the exception of extreme cases like Gaza, it doesn't get more binary than that.
I also think that for Putin it is pretty existential. Otherwise, they would have negotiated a temporary deal, took the pretty large amount of land that they had taken at the end of 2022. Work on another 'project' like Georgia for a few years, do a lot of disinformation campaigns in Europe in the meanwhile and then revisit Ukraine later. That would have a lot of benefits, like no reaming of Europe, no development of Ukraine's capabilities (resulting in a drastic drop in refinement capabilities), etc.
But he couldn't. It would make him look weak and would make him vulnerable to a coup. Continuing is the only way for him.
2014: seize Crimea (success, although it no longer serves any purpose) and Sevastopol (total failure, Sevastopol can no longer serve the Russian black sea fleet, and when it comes to the other goal: keep NATO out of the black sea, it's an even bigger failure. Russia has lost control of the skies above the black sea completely and are losing control over the sea of Azov, by withdrawing air defenses. Now go look on the map where the sea of Azov is to see the magnitude of this failure), prevent Ukraine from approaching NATO and EU (complete failure is putting it very mildly), keep Ukraine unstable (succeeded, until Euromaidan revolution, ie. actually this is a failure)
2022: maintain control over Crimea (looks to be failing, as in Ukraine still controls Crimea's water supply), build a land bridge to Crimea (successfull, except that they can't use their land bridge for anything), seize control over Ukraine's government ("denazify" Ukraine), demilitarize Ukraine (as in Ukraine accepts no to have an army. Obviously total and complete failure), and prevent Ukraine and others from coming closer to NATO (obviously total failure, and not just in Ukraine)
In June 2026, ie. about 4 weeks ago, Russia once again confirmed these goals.
Oh and they were going to do this in 3 days. Then in 3 weeks. Then in 2 months. Then they stopped making predictions. Today is day 1608 of their 3-day attempt.
The judgment was the basis of the invasion. Lukashenko and state TV did however say it; more interestingly the Biden administration - which had access to internal discussion and wrongly credited the cognition and rationality of Russian bureaucrats - also/ affirmed it.
In fact victory was assumed to have happened instantly: the famous widely mocked hundreds of miles of stalled trucks in the opening week contained //no military equipment//: it was all police equipment for managing recalcitrants in Kiev. Why? Because the war was ‘always already’ won; it was just a question of taking possession. The basic structure they falsely thought they had imposed everywhere did more or less materialize and work in the SE
I'd say neither is an attractive choice.
Trumps stupid war on Iran on the other hand is really just some air strikes, and Iran can win by just not losing, which is easy, because the US will not invade.
Russias attitude towards Ukraine has turned borderline genocidal since the start of this war.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Historical_Unity_of_Rus...
Children are routinely taken from parents and shipped off to Russia. Parents are encarcerated, conscripted, or slaughtered.
By some counts there have already been at least a million casualties in the Ukraine war, and in Gaza there is probably 100,000 casualties now (military + civilian). And, the conflicts in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo over the decades have produced about 5–5.4 million casualties, although accumulated over decades rather than in a single war.
So modern conflicts may be lower intensity and lest existential, but they can be every bit as deadly.
I'd rather trust the Nytimes and the UK intelligence who have confirmed these losses, than some random website pushing an agenda.
By hey, if it makes you happy to create you own reality, you do you.
As for the NYT, read Ashley Rindsberg's "The Gray Lady Winked."
And British intelligence? Okay then. Let me chortle into my single malt.
Of old? Isn't that what Russia is doing right now?
These may be rookie numbers for Russia, but it's still significant.
https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-ukraine-conscripts-war-combat...
Really, now? What national news do you watch? I have literally never seen current/breaking news stories about the death of American troops in action. It seems literally the most silent thing going on. I really don't know--are casualty numbers reported on a regular basis, from the "front"?
I would sometimes, after the fact, learn of repatriation flights or interment ceremonies for fallen soldiers. But only on a sporadic basis. Literally, I think I would be familiar with them by now, since Operation Desert Storm or so. This is not something they put on the news. I think that a comparison of casualties from allied and belligerent troops would be something to report, but if they do, it's just sort of being slotted into some Wikipedia article somewhere, I guess.
I knew of the helicopter crash (1) and missile attack (2). I did not know of the EOD accident (1) this weekend. So, 3 of 4 I knew about without any particularly directed effort to follow it (and the 4th, I’m sure I’ll see reporting about during the week but wasn’t consuming much content of any type over the weekend).
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/20/world/live-news/iran-war-trum...
[2] https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/20/politics/us-military-soldiers...
It happened about three days ago. I'm not even in the US and it was a top headline here.
Yesterday that NYT home page featured a cell phone video of the strike as the main story.
What national news do YOU watch? Seems like it's not good at covering the most important thing the USA is doing.
> vs. the send entire generations off to die methods of old.
Feel free to click and zoom yourself through the generational pile of almost a quarter million dead Russians below, armchair general.
The lobbyists running the show in the background make money from both the destruction as well as the reconstruction. What is stupid about that?
The politicians later get appointed to lucrative executive roles at the companies which they helped enrich on taxpayer dollars (from both countries). Not stupid either. It's smart retirement planning.
The government is a lot of things but absolutely not stupid; fooling people into thinking it is incompetence is likely part of the ruse... It's a lot easier for people to sit back quietly and watch incompetence unfold, then it is to sit back and watch evil unfold. "It's incompetence" is also a nice easy answer which prevents people from having to look deeper as I have done here.
Julian Assange said about the war in Afghanistan: "The goal is to use Afghanistan to wash money out of the tax bases of the US and Europe through Afghanistan and back into the hands of a transnational security elite. The goal is an endless war, not a successful war."
If you look at any war, you will realize that the same principles are at play. Our current global monetary order has a built-in mechanism for monetizing destruction, unfortunately. It's architected that way, intentionally or not.
I've dedicated much of my life so far to try to convey this simple message.
The way I see it there is a deep systemic issue beneath this which makes this profitable. That's the flaw which has to be solved.
Private entities should not be able to profit from taxpayer money on such vast scales. Military contacts are massive, foreign aid is massive. It takes from a large number of public hands and gives to a small number of private hands. Diffuse harms, concentrated gains.
I hope you're right though and those issues will be fixed.
"Who runs barter town" is imho the most geopolitically illuminating sentence to ever come out of Hollywood.. That's what it's all about.
How much determinism they have is irrelevant.
Trump's unprovoked attacks on them were not only extremely costly due to the Strait of Hormuz closing, but it underscored why Iran absolutely needs nukes to protect themselves. It's virtually guaranteed they'll attain nuclear weapons inside the next decade now.
That's what happens when you elect a narcissistic fraudster to run your country and its foreign policy.
The democratic process is the selection of incompetent people by unqualified people.
That's what the public education system was supposed to prevent.
George Bernard Shaw
no it is not, Russia is fighting an war of aggression on foreign soil
Or because the political goals were impossible or - almost breathtaking that this state can even exist - because the goals are entirely absent. Incidentally, having a "rotating roster" of different political goals probably counts as something worse than "absent", due to the illusory impression that it gives of "someone deciding something".
It's not surprising the US aren't winning. It's surprising they are at all able to do something that resembles waging war at that distance. Wars are incredibly hard to fight away from home. On the other side of the world? There is basically only one country in the history of ever that has been able to do that.
The article does go on to discuss the Kuwait case and that's a meaningful discussion to have, because actually winning a war so far away is surprising. It's interesting to dig into why that might have been, and the article briefly does. But why they aren't winning is less interesting.
For more meat on how important a factor distance is, Bueno de Mesquita's The War Trap presents one of the most accurate models for predicting wars[1] I know of. That model measures the fighting ability of a country by two factors:
1. It's at-home military power as a sum of population size, metal production, fuel consumption, military expenditure, etc.
2. It's power projection as the distance between its capital and the closest point of enemy land.
Note that the second number is weighted equally to the sum of all other factors, because wars are a logistical nightmare.
I guess you mean the British empire? Or Dutch? Maybe Spanish?
I was under the impression the Dutch didn't really wage interstate war in the same sense, but rather that a bunch of paramilitary private organisations happened to fly Dutch flags. I have to admit I know very little about the Spanish case, but again I thought they mainly fought proxy wars with other European colonial powers, i.e. both were equally disadvantaged by distance.
France had most of continental Europe, with distances that were much greater comparitively, considering they only had horses and sail boats. They also had big interests in the Indian ocean, Madagascar for instance, and the Caribbean.
The closest counterexample is probably the partitioning of China but that’s got its own mitigating factors
* they couldn’t even enforce the most basic sovereignty like when Spain introduced the New Laws and the encomenderos were like “lol no”
What they're doing in Iran, for example, is probably best described as 'raiding'--quick, damaging strikes--but that doesn't lead to the final result they want. It hurts the attacked country, but it doesn't control it.
America didn't have to do this. And now they cry that nobody is helping them.
I usually reply to that with reminding them Obama solved the problem and that Trump destroyed that accomplishment out of spite.
With such technical systems under state control, the state is able to focus on little other than its own powers of destruction. It becomes a zombie state, a tottering shell around an ever-growing national security apparatus. Looking around at the world, this seems to be a common morphological stage in the development of nuclear powers. There is no "collapse of commmunism" nor "collapse of financier capitalism", but different shadings on the same depressing chrysalis.
One aspect of being stuck in such a chrysalis is the utter inability to solve non-existential conflicts. There is an overwhelming tendency to make all conflict existential so the full power of the state may be brought to bear, but it's a tendency offset - so far - by the presence of deterrence. The zombies can smell each other.
The most dangerous scenario, by far, is when a nuclear power has uncertain territorial borders. Ukraine, Taiwan, Korea, Kashmir, a fair hunk of Israel - there is a reason we focus on these places in the news.
This also transforms non-nuclear states into "half sovereign" states, something which we have been seeing play out especially with the end of the SU-US Cold War.
In the real world, they choose to engage in wars that provide political power for the underlying party in power, without having a clear goal or objective on how the war would benefit the average U.S. person. This becomes more and more apparent as they continue to lose, until it’s viewed as a “success” by an invented exit criteria at the 11th hour.
This last one is to distract people from the Epstein files. And, maybe, get some oil as well.
super easy for US to kill lots of innocent civilians tho
just get rid of the agencies responsible for reviewing targets for civilians
imagine one person being able to put the entire country into yet another forever war
it will be 2029 and this nightmare will still be going down, sucking trillions from our economy while everyone suffers his damn ego
now we are taking out civilian bridges and water supplies, Iranians will never forgive us for generations, wait a another decade or two and the idiots here will elect someone even worse
btw diesel will hit all time record by the end of this year so even those who really don't care kids are being murdered for no reason might finally take it personally
Is Russia expected to win wars?
And I would rather see none of these stupid wars start in the first place.
Are you saying no one expects the US to win a war? Or that no one hopes they will? Honestly, I can't tell what you are implying, except "war bad".
I certainly don't
They are not wars in the narrow meaning. They are long term superficial conflicts, that human history has not seen before. With the modern weapons and technology a traditional war should annihilate the globe in 3 days, not still f.. around after 3 years.
The whole theatre seems to happen for three purposes: media consumption to cause widespread bother, constant increase of defense budgets and multiplication of public debts. The top leaders are not the presidents but the owners of the three pilars: finance, weapons and media, which happens to be the same group of people (guess who).
Since 1992 we are experiencing a slow war that continuous for about 8-10 years before a new one begins immediately after the previous ends. It's a perfectly executed soap opera in episodes and seasons that has managed to persuade us that it's inevitable and natural like sunlight.
Can they? Iran seems to have destroyed them pretty decisively, after the literal first day of casualties (which were happening while Iran thought it had just reached an agreement that would prevent a war, per the Omani negotiators at that time).
https://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2026/07/18/iran-ayat...
Consider that, since that time (46 years), much of Iran's income has been directed to preparation for surviving nuclear war with the USA. Ergo underground living and production facilities, similar to those that the Soviet Union has constructed in Russia:
https://www.bing.com/search?q=how%20many%20soviet%20%20under...
have been built and occupied in Iran.
Defeating such an entrenched enemy requires conquering surface forces, then denying each bunker access to the surface and bunker-by-bunker surrender, asphyxiation or destruction. This requires boots on the ground and/or automation beyond the current SOA.
The alternative is to allow Iran to possess nuclear weapons.
Or PCP! HARR!
Also since WW2, none of these countries posed a real danger to the US Public, plus people in the US are not invested. Compare what the public in the US had to do in WW2 compared to these "wars".
If the life style of the Average US person is affected like in WW2, then you can bet these "wars" would never happen. Just look at what a slight raise in US Gas Prices cause. If gas prices did not go up, people in the US would not care at all what Trump is doing to Iran.
except that without a "prime minister" now there is no separation between the "king" and the fulcrum of political power.
Of course this time its not dominated by industrial conglomerates which can retool their factories to manufacture military equipment.
> Not sure where you've read that it was
Well.. I looked at the charts. The bottom was few months after Pearl Harbor and pretty much straight up after that. It certainly did much better after US joined than while it was staying out..
September 1939: DJIA was 152.54
May 1945: DJIA was 168.30
> The bottom was few months after Pearl Harbor and pretty much straight up after that
I mean, you've now picked the bottom of the market as your starting point (and not the start of WW2), so by definition it goes up after that.
The Korean War was not approved by congress. And I don't see the point of bringing semantics into it. Are you saying that the Vietnam War, to take one, was not a war because there was no formal declaration of war?
For Vietnam, yes, if you look back the Vietnam War was officially called a "Police Action".
The politicians back then knew it was not a "real war" because war was not declared, so they came up with a new name. Since then, the politicians do not even pretend to follow the law.
"Weapons of Mass Destruction" a lie. "Weapons of Mass Distraction" a cover-up, and a mistake about to grow bigger than Putin's "walk in the park" in Ukraine.
A war based on politics and not national survival is unwinnable.
Ask Putin, Trump, Mussolini and others.
If the USA could produce 4000 tomahawks per day, instead of 400 per year the Iran thing would be over.
Also USA is very sensitive about the other side's civilian deaths.
I'd argue that it's not sensitive enough. We've bombed schools and desalination plants.
If your goal in a war is to topple a regime and prop up a more friendly one, then you can't just bomb them to submission. All that does is topple the regime and replace it with a probably worse one. You need to convince the population that the new regime is actually better, and you don't convince anyone of anything by killing their kids.
Well depends what you compare against. Also its generally not worth wasting precision munitions (you have a limited amount of them to start with) on non military targets.
Its literally bragging about the oposite while intentionally killing civilians.
USA is just not sensitive to that. It is sensitive to lives of own soldiers, very much.
USA is attacking desalination plants and civilian infrastructure. It was doing it in the first stage of the war and led with those attacks in the second.
USA is killing fishermen in pacific. Just to make Hegseth feel like manly man. USA is engineering human catastrophe in Cuba. And it is supporting genocide in Gaza.
npr, btw, is in some sort of decline in news source legitimacy having to resort to these simple-minded click bait headlines ...
Trump hasn’t got the slightest idea how to even get as far as Bush did..
Then their failures to bulld a stable government brought the Taliban back.
US never closed the border with Pakistani - and the talibans retreated in Paki when under attack and then went back in Afghanistan when things calmed down.
In Afghanistan US won as much as it won in Vietnam.
Now? Who knows, I guess the military is doing reasonably fine given the constraints they operate under but I doubt competent is the right word.
What is clear is that Bush (in combination with his administration) was pretty much Napoleon compared to Trump, Hegseth & co.
The White House asserts that it is defending the American people from the devastating consequences of the illegal importation of drugs by ‘narco-terrorists’ – consequences that could be compared to an armed attack against the US. However, in international law, only a kinetic assault with military or similar means qualifies as a trigger for self-defence.
https://www.chathamhouse.org/2026/01/us-capture-president-ni...
New leader is equally oppressive, but this time guided by American admin.
All that’s left is a varnish of legality.
But it's not as reductive and simple as your comment suggests. And there's probably still more to the story that the NYT hasn't yet (nor will for a while) leak.
They half succeeded in creating South Korea. They succeeded in Iraq, which I like to always point out because that war is often cited as a "loss" for the US. Mostly because Bush declared it over when it was really just beginning.
Really hard to say what will happen with Iran. Everyone online likes to act like military prophets that know the future, but truthfully it's very difficult to predict imo. And what does happen depends probably on how deep the US invests into it. If they start sending troops in to invade, then that obviously changes things.