With few exceptions, the U.S. military, certainly since the Korean War, has had an unprecedented capacity for winning all of the battles it has fought. Yet, concurrently, the U.S. government has a parallel capacity for losing wars, defined as failing to gain its objectives in the peace that followed the end of hostilities. Consider the wars and major conflicts the United States has waged over the past nine decades.
We entered World War I in April 1917, late in a contest that began in 1914. American man and material power turned the tide, enabling the exhausted Allies to defeat the equally exhausted Central Powers. But the subsequent peace was a disaster, sowing the seeds for another world war two decades later.
Of the many reasons that caused us to lose the peace, the greed and anger of the Allies in seeking reparations and the failure of President Woodrow Wilson to secure bipartisan support from the Senate for the Versailles Treaty were atop the list.
World War II was the shining contradiction to these observations. We did not win every battle. Indeed, there were too many battles in both the Atlantic and Pacific theaters where we were badly bloodied and beaten. However, in concert with our allies who held the fort in the early days of the war until Japan struck at Pearl Harbor and the Russians who ultimately bled Germany's Wehrmacht white, we won both the war and the peace. History reminds us that as early as 1942, Washington began contemplating how the post-war period should be managed.
The Korean War was, at best, a draw. In Vietnam, for the entire war, the U.S. military won every battle, beginning in the Ia Drang Valley in 1965. As the North Vietnamese pointedly observed, however, tactical victory made no difference. It was Hanoi that won the war.
Similarly, in Gulf Wars I and II and Afghanistan, the U.S. and coalition militaries won and will win every battle. Overwhelming is not too strong a word to describe the defeats of Saddam Hussein twice and the overthrow of the Taliban in late 2001.
Whether one was for or against Gulf War II, we are, by any definition, far from winning, if winning has any positive meaning in achieving our aims or leaving Iraq as peaceful, stable, and under the rule of law. The same is true in Afghanistan. NATO has won and will win every battle against the insurgents. But there is no way NATO and the United States can win the war unless civil reforms take hold in Afghanistan to produce a political cure for the ills that are infecting that country.
This briefest of historical journeys is instructive. Perhaps embedded in our political DNA is a gene that causes politicians and publics to think in terms of battles, not wars, and keeps them from thinking through the consequences of using military force, starting first with the outcomes to be achieved in the peace once the war has been won.
The military, however, has learned much since Vietnam. Testifying before Congress, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Admiral Mike Mullen has repeatedly made the case for more money and support for the State Department and other civilian agencies on the correct grounds that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan cannot be won by military force alone. So has Defense Secretary Robert Gates. But that does not mean that this or subsequent administrations will listen to this advice.
A future task for the next administration and generation of politicians is to ensure that U.S. prowess on the battlefield in which we win virtually every fight becomes translated to winning the wars and the peace that required using military arms in the first place. That may require the military to stand up to political leadership, clearly risking a collision with civilian control. Balance is crucial. But to the degree past is prologue, it is likely the American military still will do far better in battles than its governments will do in wars or in the peace that follows.