Limited Wars Are Forever Wars
At least that is the way the US fights them. If you have limited goals, achieve them, and leave there is no problem. In Iraq and Afghanistan the US did achieve its initial goals; then shifted to nation-building and failure.
Both terms are important to understanding the role of the U.S. military in the world, argues the military historian Donald Stoker in his new book, Why America Loses Wars: Limited War and U.S. Strategy From the Korean War to the Present. Stoker’s core argument is that while limited wars appeal to the public and to strategists, the idea is both deceptive and destructive. Limited war, he argues, is a largely meaningless term that’s used in order to gloss over changing political aims that are never accounted for; the vagueness of the definition and goals allows conflicts to continue indefinitely, with no chance to win the peace without a coherent plan of action.
The book makes a clear and objective argument that post-Korea conflicts involving the United States show that limited war is at best a misnomer and at worst a path into quagmires that consume American lives and treasure while unleashing destruction on the countries they’re fought in.
As Stoker explains, limited wars, rather than limiting conflict, create the conditions in which the United States is caught in a never-ending cycle of forever wars. That makes their actual outcomes the polar opposite of what limited war is supposed to achieve for U.S. interests.
“If you don’t know what you want,” Stoker asks rhetorically near the end of the book, “how do you make a peace that will help you get it?”
Stoker shows that, in practice, the illusion of limited war presents short-term gain but long-term pain as the strategic inertia created by locking into an inflexible view of limited goals leads to forever war, where the political objective of the conflict is ill-defined, unlimited, or too fluid to pin down.
“Part of the problem is that we don’t know what we want,” Stoker told Foreign Policy in early June. “If there is a limited aim, then that aim is what we want, what we’re doing it for.”