One of the great tragedies of the past sixty years or so is that American warmasters, seduced by their own power, came to believe that they could finally construct a “clean” war, both in execution and in purpose, so ended up creating the fantasy of “limited war” in service to a fantasy of nation building. It’s shocking how similar the Afghanistan/Iraq business is to Vietnam before it, except just even more: even more willful blindness to the nature of the enemy and the absurdity of the war aims, empowered by even greater technical overmatch. All our technological progress just enabled our leaders to lose even more spectacularly and expensively to an even weaker enemy by misunderstanding that enemy even more thoroughly while servicing an even more ridiculous fantasy of a strategic goal.
The end result of which, amazingly, has not only been an absence of justice for those losers, but the lobotomization of their sons with respect to war. The Tucker Carlson generation has taken from all of this that war is just an impossible task. There’s no point in fighting anyone for any purpose, except maybe against a direct military invasion of the homeland, and even that we will probably lose because there just is no way to win a war.
Our Founders must be turning in their graves, much less Alexander the Great.
We must, as the next next generation, fully internalize the realization not that war is unwinnable, but just that we were led by three or four straight generations of morons. Proper war aims, grounded in realities of culture and religion, driving proper strategic and operational objectives.