A Veteran’s Reckoning with the Best Case for the Wars He Has Examined

A note to the reader: This article is the fifth installment in a series examining the American way of war through the lens of the Eight Critical Skills. The first, “Command of the Reload,” examined the mathematics of arsenal depletion. The second, “The Art of Escalation,” documented the behavioral pattern by which wars expand. The third, “The First Decision Is the Only Decision That Matters,” isolated the failure at the moment of commitment. The fourth, “The Glorious Endings of Our Wars,” examined the final acts — the evacuations, the collapses, and the ledger. This article does something the first four did not. It listens.

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I have spent the past several weeks building a case. Four articles. Thousands of words. The arithmetic of depletion, the mechanics of escalation, the cognitive failure at the moment of the first decision, and the catastrophic endings that followed. The evidence is drawn from primary sources, official records, congressional testimony, and the published conclusions of the institutions that fought these wars and then studied why they failed.

The case is strong. I believe it.

But a case that has never been tested against the strongest opposing arguments is not a case. It is a brief. And a brief that ignores the defense is not persuasive — it is incomplete.

I owe this article to the people who disagree with me. Not the ones who dismiss the argument without reading it, and not the ones who substitute insult for analysis.

I owe it to the serious people — the veterans who served in these wars and believe their sacrifice mattered, the strategists who made these decisions in good faith under impossible pressure, the citizens who supported these wars because they believed the alternative was worse, and the conservative thinkers who have constructed genuine intellectual arguments for American military engagement that deserve to be heard, understood, and answered.

I have thought about these counter-arguments myself. Some of them kept me awake. Several of them forced me to sharpen my own analysis. One of them — the hardest one — I cannot fully rebut, and I will say so plainly.

The Eight Critical Skills demand intellectual honesty. That means engaging the best version of the opposing case, not the weakest.

What follows is my attempt to do that.

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“We Would Have Won If They’d Let Us Finish”

The Argument

This is the argument I hear most often from Vietnam veterans, and I respect it because I understand where it comes from. The military case is straightforward: American forces never lost a major engagement in Vietnam. The Tet Offensive of 1968, which shattered public confidence, was a catastrophic military defeat for the North Vietnamese. They were decimated in the field. The war was being won.

Then the politicians quit. Nixon promised South Vietnam airpower if the North violated the Paris Accords. The North violated them before the ink dried. Congress passed the Case-Church Amendment in 1973, prohibiting further military action in Southeast Asia. Military aid to South Vietnam was slashed from $2.1 billion to $700 million. Gerald Ford’s emergency aid requests were rejected. South Vietnam didn’t fall because the strategy failed — it fell because a Watergate-weakened president couldn’t deliver on promises made to an ally, and a Democratic Congress pulled the plug.

The military won the war. The politicians lost the peace.

I have sat with this argument. I served in the Navy during those years. I knew men who fought in that war and believed in what they were doing. Their service was real. Their courage was real. The argument that they were betrayed by the political system is not frivolous.

My Answer

But the argument, taken to its logical conclusion, proves the thesis of this series rather than refuting it.

The fact that sustaining South Vietnam required permanent American military commitment — that the moment U.S. support was withdrawn, the state collapsed in twenty-seven months — is precisely the definition of a war fought without an achievable political objective. A genuinely successful war produces a self-sustaining outcome.

After World War II, Germany and Japan did not require permanent American military presence to prevent re-collapse. After Korea, South Korea built a military capable of its own defense. It took decades, and the American commitment was substantial, but the result was a nation that could stand.

South Vietnam, after twenty years of American involvement, 58,000 American dead, and more than a trillion dollars, could not survive a single budget reduction. That is not a congressional failure. That is the evidence that no viable South Vietnamese state existed to be saved. The war’s architects had not built a nation. They had built a dependency.

You cannot blame the ending on the exit when the exit revealed that there was never anything self-sustaining underneath.

Clausewitz would have recognized this immediately. The political objective — a self-governing, non-communist South Vietnam capable of defending itself — was never achieved because it could not be achieved by military means alone. Congress did not lose the war. Congress recognized, too late and too abruptly, that the war had already been lost at the level of strategy.

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“You’re Not Counting What Didn’t Happen”

The Argument

This is the strongest conservative argument in the entire debate, and I want to give it its full weight.

Al-Qaeda in 2001 was a functional organization with state sanctuary, training infrastructure, recruitment pipelines, and a demonstrated capacity for mass-casualty attacks on American soil. The Afghanistan war dismantled that infrastructure. The broader counterterrorism apparatus — built in the aftermath of 9/11 — disrupted plots, killed leadership, and denied safe havens across multiple continents. No comparable attack has occurred on American soil in twenty-four years.

My ROI calculation, the argument goes, counts every dollar spent and every life lost. It does not count what didn’t happen. The disruption of al-Qaeda’s organizational capacity is an achieved strategic objective. I am measuring the cost of the insurance policy without crediting the claims it prevented.

I have thought about this argument more carefully than any other. It deserves a precise answer rather than a dismissive one.

My Answer

The initial Afghanistan mission — dismantling al-Qaeda and denying sanctuary — was achieved within ninety days. It cost approximately $20 billion and fewer than a hundred American lives. That is a genuinely successful strategic operation, and I have said so explicitly in this series. I do not dispute it.

The question is not whether the first ninety days were justified. The question is whether the subsequent twenty years and $2.3 trillion bought additional security commensurate with their cost.

The 9/11 attacks were not prevented from recurring by nation-building in Helmand Province or constructing girls’ schools in Kandahar — however worthy those projects were as humanitarian acts. They were prevented by the initial strike, by the intelligence apparatus that followed, by airport security and domestic surveillance systems that would have existed regardless of whether American soldiers were patrolling Afghan villages in year fifteen.

Furthermore, the broader “war on terror” created at least as many terrorists as it eliminated. The Iraq War — which had nothing to do with 9/11 — produced ISIS, which required a second American intervention to defeat and destabilized a region that remains unstable today. The drone campaigns in Yemen and Pakistan generated recruitment surges that every counterterrorism expert has documented. If the insurance-policy argument were valid, it would justify the initial ninety-day campaign and the intelligence architecture that followed. It does not justify the subsequent two decades of military occupation, which is the expenditure actually in dispute.

The insurance policy was worth buying. But somewhere around year three, we stopped paying premiums and started renovating the house — a house we did not own, in a neighborhood we did not understand, with contractors who could not agree on the floor plan.

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“The Alternative Was Worse”

The Argument

This argument takes different forms depending on the war, but the structure is consistent: the relevant comparison is not “war versus peace” but “war versus what the world would have looked like without intervention.”

A nuclear-armed Saddam in a post-sanctions Iraq. An unchallenged Taliban running a permanent terrorist factory. An Iran emboldened by American inaction, building a nuclear weapon under cover of diplomatic delay. The domino theory was partially vindicated — Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, and the Philippines did not fall to communism, and the decades of American commitment in Southeast Asia bought time for those societies to develop economically and resist.

My ledger, the argument goes, counts what was spent. It does not count what was prevented.

I acknowledge the force of this argument. The counterfactual is the single most significant gap in retrospective war analysis, and I have not been immune to it.

My Answer

The counterfactual argument requires demonstrating two things:

• First, that the threat was real and imminent; and
• Second, that the war as actually conducted was the most effective response.

In each case, the second requirement fails catastrophically.

Saddam Hussein was a genuine threat in 1990, when he invaded Kuwait. By 2003, he was a contained, degraded dictator under the most comprehensive sanctions regime in history, with no-fly zones covering the majority of his country, his military a fraction of its former capability, and — as the Iraq Survey Group conclusively established — no active weapons of mass destruction program.

The Duelfer Report confirmed not that Saddam had WMDs, but that he had the intention to reconstitute them after sanctions ended. That is a meaningfully different finding — one that would not justify a preventive war under any established framework of international law as it existed in 2003. The decision was not between a full invasion and a nuclear-armed Saddam. The decision was between invasion and a range of less costly options — sustained containment, no-fly zones, support for internal opposition — that were never seriously evaluated because the decision to invade had already been made.

The regional domino argument for Vietnam requires demonstrating that American military action in Vietnam was causally responsible for the stability of Southeast Asia — and that case has never been made convincingly. Thailand’s stability owed more to its monarchy and military than to American combat operations in the Mekong Delta. Indonesia’s turn from communism was Suharto’s coup, not American strategy. Singapore was Lee Kuan Yew. The domino theory makes a prediction: if Vietnam falls, the region follows. Vietnam fell in 1975. The dominoes did not fall. The theory’s own test case refuted it.

The “alternative was worse” argument is emotionally compelling because it is unfalsifiable. We cannot replay history. But we can observe that the alternatives actually chosen — the wars actually fought — produced outcomes that were, in every case, either identical to or worse than the conditions they were designed to prevent. If the alternative was worse, it is incumbent on the argument’s defenders to explain what, precisely, would have been worse than the rise of ISIS, the empowerment of Iran, the return of the Taliban, and $8 trillion in debt. That explanation has never been provided in persuasive form.

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“Iraq Liberated Twenty-Five Million People”

The Argument

The conservative humanitarian case for Iraq is genuine and should not be dismissed. Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons at Halabja, killing five thousand people in a single day. He invaded two neighbors. He tortured political opponents industrially. His removal ended one of the most brutal dictatorships of the late twentieth century. And the Kurds — who now govern a stable, prosperous, pro-American autonomous region — would not have that freedom without the Iraq War. My ledger, the argument goes, ignores the most significant humanitarian achievement of the intervention entirely.

I do not dismiss this. The Kurdish achievement is real. The suffering under Saddam was real.

My Answer

But the Iraq War was not sold to the American people as a humanitarian intervention. It was sold as a disarmament campaign. The Congressional authorization of October 2002 directed the use of force to disarm WMDs, end terrorist support, and free the Iraqi people — in that order. Paul Wolfowitz admitted that WMDs were chosen as the justification because they were “the one issue everyone could agree on.” That is not intelligence-driven decision-making. That is marketing. And the product did not match the advertisement.

The Kurds argument is powerful precisely because it suggests that a different strategy — sustained support for the Kurdish north and the Shia south, no-fly zones, patient containment of a regime that was already contained — could have achieved the humanitarian objective at a fraction of the cost. Kurdish autonomy was built within the no-fly zones established after the Gulf War, not after the 2003 invasion. The Kurds were already free. What the invasion did was plunge the rest of Iraq into a sectarian civil war that killed more than 200,000 civilians and empowered Iran as the dominant regional power.

If the argument is humanitarian, then the humanitarian ledger must be read in full. And in full, the ledger shows more than 200,000 Iraqi civilians dead, four million displaced, a sectarian civil war that destroyed the fabric of Iraqi society, and the rise of ISIS — which committed a genocide against the Yazidis that the intervention was supposed to have made impossible. One cannot cite the Kurdish achievement and ignore the Yazidi genocide. Both are products of the same decision.

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“The Constitutional Argument Applies to Everyone — Not Just This Administration”

The Argument

This is the counter-argument I find most difficult to dismiss, because it is factually correct.

My series invokes Article I, Section 8, Hamilton’s Federalist No. 69, and Madison’s letter to Jefferson on executive war powers. The argument is historically accurate and constitutionally sound. But conservatives are right to observe that the principle has been violated by every president of both parties since 1973.

• Clinton bombed Kosovo without a declaration of war.
• Obama launched military operations in Libya, Syria, and Yemen without congressional authorization.
• Biden conducted strikes in Syria.

The War Powers Resolution has been ignored or circumvented by every president since Nixon.

The charge: if the principle matters, it matters universally. Applying it specifically to one administration while remaining silent about fifty years of bipartisan executive overreach is not constitutional scholarship. It is partisan framing dressed as principle.

My Answer

The charge is fair, and I accept it directly. Yes. The War Powers Resolution has been violated by Democratic presidents and Republican presidents alike. Clinton in Kosovo. Obama in Libya. Biden in Syria. The constitutional failure is bipartisan. It is systemic. And it spans fifty years.

That is not a defense of the current operation. It is an indictment of a half-century of institutional decay.

Two wrongs do not produce a right. They produce a pattern. And the pattern is precisely what this series documents: the progressive erosion of the constitutional mechanism designed to ensure that the decision to spend the nation’s blood and treasure requires the informed consent of the people’s representatives. The fact that Clinton violated it does not mean Trump is not violating it. The fact that Obama violated it does not make any of the violations constitutional.

The relevant question is not whether “the other side did it too.” They did. The relevant question is whether Hamilton was right when he wrote in Federalist No. 69 that the president’s war powers would be subordinate to Congress, and whether Madison was right when he wrote to Jefferson that the executive is “the branch of power most interested in war, and most prone to it.” The historical record of the past fifty years is the most powerful possible vindication of Madison’s warning. Every president — of every party — has proved him right.

This series does not exempt any administration from the constitutional standard. It applies the standard to the current moment because the current moment is the one in which we are spending $1 billion a day. If that makes me an advocate for the Constitution, I will accept the label.

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“Escalation Was Adaptation, Not Pathology”

The Argument

My escalation thesis assumes that when a war begins with limited objectives and then expands, the expansion is a failure. But conservatives argue — with genuine force — that in several cases the expansion was the rational response to real conditions on the ground. The bombing of Cambodia was not escalation for its own sake. North Vietnamese supply lines ran through Cambodia. The 2007 Iraq surge was not irrational escalation. It was a successful adaptation that reduced violence by eighty percent and stabilized the country enough to enable the 2011 withdrawal.

The pattern I call “escalation” is sometimes called “adjusting to reality.” The alternative — rigid adherence to the original limited objective when conditions have changed — is not strategic wisdom. It is strategic rigidity.

This argument is serious, and the surge is the most powerful specific counter-example available. I want to give it the careful response it deserves.

My Answer

The surge did reduce violence dramatically — from 2007 to 2008. It produced the Anbar Awakening and genuine tactical gains. The soldiers who fought it performed with extraordinary skill and courage. I do not dispute any of that.

But the purpose of the surge, as stated by its architects, was not to reduce violence as an end in itself. It was to create space for political reconciliation between Sunni, Shia, and Kurd that would produce a self-sustaining Iraqi political order. That reconciliation did not occur. Nouri al-Maliki used the reduced violence not to build inclusive governance but to consolidate sectarian power, purge Sunni commanders, and hollow out the army that the surge had rebuilt. By 2014, ISIS captured Mosul with fifteen hundred to three thousand fighters against thirty thousand Iraqi troops on paper.

The surge was a tactical success that served a political objective — sectarian reconciliation — that was never achieved. It is the clearest possible illustration of the thesis that runs through every article in this series: military force can win battles and still fail to achieve the political objective, because the political objective required capacities that military force does not possess.

The surge did not fail because the soldiers fought poorly. It did not fail because the generals lacked skill. It failed because the political preconditions for its success did not exist and could not be created by American military means. The reconciliation that was supposed to follow the violence reduction did not follow, because the sectarian dynamics of Iraqi politics were not amenable to military solution.

Which is exactly what Clausewitz said. The military objective must serve the political objective. When the political objective cannot be achieved by military means, no amount of tactical success will produce strategic victory.

The surge proved Clausewitz right. It did not refute him.

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“What Would You Have Done?”

The Argument

This is the argument I cannot fully rebut, and intellectual honesty requires me to say so.

After September 11, with three thousand Americans dead, with al-Qaeda claiming responsibility from an Afghan sanctuary, with a Taliban government that refused to surrender bin Laden — what, precisely, would I have done?

The answer “don’t invade” requires specifying what I would have done instead. It requires defending the proposition that the alternative would have produced better outcomes. And it requires accepting the political reality that no American president — of either party — could have survived the domestic consequences of inaction after three thousand citizens were murdered on national television.

Similarly: after Saddam defied seventeen United Nations resolutions, after the 1998 Iraq Liberation Act — signed by a Democratic president — made regime change the official policy of the United States, after every major Western intelligence agency assessed that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction — what was the specific alternative, and why am I confident it would have worked?

The conservative challenge is direct: it is easy to critique from the armchair. It is harder to prescribe from the cockpit.

My Answer

I accept the force of this challenge, and I will not pretend it has a clean answer.

But I will say this: the question “What would you have done?” contains within it the assumption that the only options available were the options that were chosen. That assumption is precisely what the evidence challenges.

After September 11, the initial response — special operations forces, precision airpower, alliance with the Northern Alliance, destruction of al-Qaeda’s infrastructure — was correct, proportionate, and effective. I have said so in this series. The question is not whether to respond. The question is whether the response should have expanded from a ninety-day counterterrorism operation into a twenty-year nation-building project that the people directing it privately admitted they did not understand.

Lieutenant General Douglas Lute, the White House war czar, said it: “We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan. We didn’t know what we were doing.”

That is not my assessment. That is the assessment of the man in charge. When the people running the war tell you they didn’t know what they were doing, the question “What would you have done?” has a partial answer: not that.

In Iraq, the alternative was not inaction. It was continued containment — the policy that had kept Saddam in his box for twelve years, that had degraded his military capability by ninety percent, that had given the Kurds the autonomous freedom they already possessed. The argument that containment was failing requires explaining how a contained, degraded dictator with no weapons of mass destruction and no operational alliance with al-Qaeda constituted a more urgent threat than the invasion itself proved to be.

The honest answer to “What would you have done?” is not “nothing.” It is: “I would have done less, and I would have defined what ‘done’ looked like before I started.”

That is the Clausewitz standard. That is the standard this series applies. And it is the standard that was not met — not in Vietnam, not in Iraq, not in Afghanistan, and not now.

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The Summation

I have given the defense its day in court. I have presented the strongest conservative arguments in their strongest form. I have acknowledged where they contain genuine force, and I have identified the one argument I cannot fully rebut.

Now let me read the verdict.

The arguments for these wars share a common structure. They begin with a real threat — a communist insurgency, a dictator with chemical weapons, a terrorist organization with global reach, a theocratic regime pursuing nuclear capability. The threats were genuine. I do not dispute that.

But the arguments then make a leap that the evidence does not support. They assume that because the threat was real, the war as conducted was the appropriate response. They assume that because the initial action was justified, the subsequent escalation was also justified. They assume that because the military performed brilliantly, the strategy was sound. And they assume that because the alternative might have been bad, the outcome actually produced must have been better.

In every case, the evidence contradicts these assumptions.

• Vietnam was fought to prevent communist unification. It produced communist unification — plus 58,000 American dead and three million Vietnamese dead. The dominoes that were supposed to fall when Vietnam fell did not fall. The threat was real. The response was disproportionate, mis-specified, and ultimately counterproductive.
• Iraq was fought to disarm a dictator, end terrorist support, and promote democracy. It found no weapons, produced a failed state, empowered the precise regional adversary it was designed to contain, and generated ISIS. The threat was real. The response made the threat worse.
• Afghanistan began with a ninety-day campaign that achieved its objective. It then expanded into a twenty-year nation-building project that its own directors admitted they did not understand, at a cost of $2.3 trillion. The Taliban reclaimed the country in eleven days. The threat was real. The initial response was effective. Everything that followed was not.

The pattern is not “America fights wars and loses.” The pattern is “America fights wars without defining what victory means, allows objectives to drift until no one can identify the endpoint, and then acts surprised when the ending looks exactly like every previous ending.”

The conservative counter-arguments do not address this pattern. They explain individual decisions. They justify individual escalations. They defend individual operations. But they do not answer the question that Clausewitz placed at the center of strategic thought: What did you intend to achieve, and how did you intend to achieve it?

In not one of these wars was that question answered honestly before the commitment was made.

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Let me be clear about what this series is and what it is not.

It is not anti-war. There are wars that must be fought. The initial response to September 11 was one of them. The liberation of Europe was one of them. The defense of South Korea — with all its cost and imperfection — produced a self-sustaining democracy that stands today. Wars with defined objectives, honest cost assessments, achievable endpoints, and the sustained commitment of the nation’s representatives can succeed. They have succeeded.

This series is pro-clarity.

It demands that before a single soldier is deployed, before a single missile is launched, before a single dollar is borrowed against the future earnings of American taxpayers, the nation’s leaders answer three questions:

• What is the objective? Not the rhetoric. Not the bumper sticker. The specific, measurable, achievable political end state that military force is being employed to produce.
• Is military force the appropriate instrument? Destroying a nuclear facility is a military task. Building a democracy is not. Sinking a navy is a military task. Controlling what replaces a government is not.
• What does ‘done’ look like? If no one can describe the conditions under which the war ends, the war will not end. It will exhaust itself — or, more precisely, it will exhaust the nation that wages it.

These are not partisan questions. They are not liberal questions or conservative questions. They are the questions that Carl von Clausewitz said must be answered before the first soldier moves. They are the questions that the Founders embedded in the Constitution when they placed the war power in Congress rather than in the hands of a single executive. They are the questions that were not answered in Vietnam, were answered falsely in Iraq, were answered for the wrong war in Afghanistan, and are changing weekly in Iran.

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I began this series with an observation about arithmetic. I will end it with an observation about trust.

The most expensive casualty of these wars is not measured in dollars or lives, as devastating as those losses are. It is measured in the currency that holds a republic together: the trust of the governed.

• When a president tells the American people that a war will be short and it lasts twenty years, trust erodes.
• When a secretary of defense tells Congress that the cost will be eighty billion dollars and it reaches three trillion, trust erodes.
• When an administration presents manufactured certainty about weapons that do not exist, trust erodes.
• When the Afghan government is excluded from its own peace deal and then told its army can hold, trust erodes.

When the people who directed the wars later admit, in recorded interviews, that they never understood the countries they were trying to rebuild, trust does not erode. It collapses.

And when trust collapses, the republic itself is weakened — because a republic depends on the belief that the government makes consequential decisions honestly and submits them to the judgment of the people. The Founders understood this. It is why they placed the war power where they placed it. It is why Hamilton and Madison and Jay wrote what they wrote. It is why the Anti-Federalists warned what they warned.

The arguments I have examined in this article are arguments made in good faith by serious people who love this country. I have treated them with respect because they deserve respect. But respect does not require agreement, and engagement does not require surrender.

The evidence is in. Three wars. Three failures to define the objective. Three escalations beyond anything promised. Three endings that produced the outcomes the wars were designed to prevent.

The conservative counter-arguments explain pieces of this record. They do not explain the pattern. They do not explain why the same failure — the same structural, cognitive, institutional failure — has repeated itself across six decades, three wars, three administrations of both parties, and $8 trillion in expenditure.

The pattern is the verdict.

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And on a kitchen table in America, the bill gets larger.

It includes now not only the cost of the wars themselves, but the cost of the arguments we failed to have before we fought them — the arguments we owed ourselves and never conducted, the questions we should have answered and never asked, the clarity we should have demanded and never received.

This article is the argument we owed ourselves. It is late. The bill is already enormous. But if it prevents even one future commitment made without defined objectives, honest cost projections, and a clear definition of what “done” looks like, then it will have been worth writing.

The Founders gave us the tools.

Clausewitz gave us the framework.

The evidence of six decades gave us the lessons.

Whether we use them is the only question that remains.

Have a nice day.

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Charles Cranston Jett is an author, executive coach, and leadership scholar based in Chicago. A United States Navy veteran (1964–1970), he is the creator of Civic Sage (civicsage.com) and host of the Making a Great America, Jefferson-Adams Letters, and It’s All About Skills podcasts. This is the final article in his series on the American way of war, which includes “Command of the Reload,” “The Art of Escalation,” “The First Decision Is the Only Decision That Matters,” and “The Glorious Endings of Our Wars.”

Copyright © 2026 by Charles Cranston Jett. All rights reserved.