We can no longer win wars because it is impolite to apply the violence required to do so.
When JFK was president, a reporter interviewed both the president and the first lady separately. He asked each one who gave the children punishments when such were required. And each answered in the exact same manner: as my spouse is of too good a heart, I am the one who has to inflict punishment on a misbehaving child.
Since the end of World War II, the US and the West have pretty much never won any war of consequence. Desert Storm was a beautiful expression of American military power and ingenuity. The until-then untested A-10 destroyed Iraqi armor like it was tissue. Sure, there were victories in Grenada and Panama. But Korea was a tie, Vietnam was a loss, and it’s hard to call Afghanistan or Iraq victories. Why can’t we win anymore? One can make the same argument about Israel. Though the country boasts of killing around 8,500 Hezbollah fighters, rockets from a Lebanese terror group recently sent swimmers running for their lives in the northern Israeli town of Nahariya. Hezbollah, Iran, Hamas, and the Houthis—they may be damaged, but they are all certainly still around. Why?
Every task, whether individual or national, has certain requirements. If one faints at the sight of blood, maybe being a doctor is not the right job. There are many physically demanding jobs where men seem best equipped for the demands. One of the shibboleths of the left for the past half-century is that anyone can do anything. DEI and pushing women into combat roles are two manifestations of such thinking. The outcomes often prove that not everyone is capable of doing every job. A woman holding a stretcher, taking a 220-pound Marine to a waiting helicopter, may be less capable than a male doing the same job. At the national level, war-making includes certain assumptions. One does not have to use nuclear weapons on every problem, though there was a time when American leaders thought that such weapons would obviate the need for much of the country’s conventional forces. If the goal is to win a war or inflict a certain level of predetermined pain on an enemy, then the effort must be appropriate. For decades, it has not been, and the bad guys have figured this point out.
Let’s look at the recent riots in France after the Parisian club won the European soccer championship. Much of the damage would appear to come from recent “immigrants”, many of whom arrived illegally in France and other countries in Europe. There are very simple solutions to this problem, should Monsieur Macron ever conclude that torching cars and stores is really bad for France’s well-being. One could stop all illegal entry into the country, even if it meant sinking approaching vessels. Donald Trump has effectively stopped illegal entry at the southern border. The French could eject all illegal aliens and any aliens with legal visas who were involved in crime, such as torching a bunch of bikes near the Eiffel Tower. Finally, local Muslims could be monitored for anti-French behavior via police and other intelligence-gathering bodies. And here is where we have all of our modern problems.
For the French to stop the boats from washing up on their shores would require a few things. The first would be a belief that France is an amazing country, one worth preserving and protecting for the local citizenry. No modern Western country sees itself in a very positive light, save possibly the US under Donald Trump. They are all convinced that they are terrible former colonialists, with no particular claim to success or contribution to the improvement of the world. Since the French don’t think much of themselves and are convinced that their prior colonial activities in North Africa make them evil, they are squeamish about stopping the boats of future Paris burners.
But let’s pretend that Macron had the courage to stop the boats. Then he would need to deal with the riffraff already present. And as one can see from the way ICE officers are treated in Minnesota and New Jersey, removing illegals will require an enormous level of violence. In the past, leaders put the well-being of their countries first, and as long as the people accepted that the violence applied fit the bill, there were no problems. But with leftist citizens, news services, courts, and police bodies, how can France or England employ required levels of physicality to simply throw out people who have no business being in their countries in the first place? Ain’t gonna happen. But let’s pretend that it did. Now, the time has come for monitoring the locals. You can forget that: RACISM. But there is some percentage of the local population that wants to subvert the elected and kosher government and turn the country into a Sharia state. Don’t you want to monitor such people and make sure that they don’t succeed? As with the tens of thousands of abused white British girls at the hands of primarily Pakistani men, looking racist is too high a price for doing the right thing.
Now let’s move on to war. Israel has faced Hezbollah for decades. There is no question that, on paper, Israel is far stronger militarily than is the Iranian proxy. But Israel will never fight to its full strength. Israel and the US will never attack a terror group in a manner that will lead to its demise. The reason is simple: in order to destroy Hezbollah or Hamas or even the mullah/IRGC leadership, you will have to kill a lot of civilians. The days of nicely lined-up tanks and orderly groups of soldiers facing off are mostly behind us. Modern bad guys spring up from the locals and embed themselves in the same. The last time I saw a proper military column involved miles of Russian armor that got stuck on its way to Kyiv and was wiped out by Ukrainian forces. If you really want to destroy Hezbollah, you will have to take about half of Lebanon with them. In the past, that’s what would have been done in order to guarantee military victory. But as some have noted in comments to my articles, since war entered the living room in Vietnam, the ability to apply violence has been severely limited. People don’t like to see a lot of dead bodies. Now add all of the lefty “aid” organizations, media, UN, and other anti-Western bodies, and you simply cannot apply the level of violence needed to actually put Hezbollah or Hamas away for good. The bad guys know this and rely on it in order to fight another day.
So, what’s the solution? I don’t know. War has not changed: General Curtis LeMay said that if you kill enough of the enemy, they will stop fighting. But we can no longer kill enough of them. In the process of fighting wars as they have always been fought, international nudniks will make the price of doing the right thing so high that the good guys will bug out too early. Some feel that the US, while clearly crushing Iraq in the first Gulf War, stopped too soon and left too early. If Israel gave Gaza what it deserves to put Hamas away, the entire Israeli political and military leadership would find itself in jail at the Hague. Wars go on forever, not due to a lack of weapons or delivery systems. They go on forever and end as a tie or worse because we no longer have the will or the ability to fight a war to victory.
War has not changed; our ability to win has changed for the worse.